Zoom
A typical 3x optical zoom range, with good performance.

35mm	105mm	4.1x Digital Zoom

The FinePix A350 zooms over the equivalent of a 35-105mm range, fairly typical for its class. Though a little soft at wide angle, with some noticeable coma distortion in the trees, the A350's lens still performs quite well. The 4.1x digital zoom takes it out to 12.2x total, albeit with the loss of quality that digital zoom creates.

Macro
A small macro area with good detail and high resolution. Flash exposes fairly well, but flash illumination is uneven up close.

Standard Macro	Macro with Flash

The FinePix A350's macro setting performs well, zooming the lens to wide angle and capturing a small minimum area of 3.06 x 2.30 inches (78 x 58 millimeters). Detail is strong and resolution high, with only a moderate amount of softening in the corners from the lens. (Most cameras have some softening in the corners in macro mode.) The flash throttles down pretty well, but its light covers the frame evenly, particularly at the bottom of the frame and the top corners. You can defeat this using digital zoom, however. (Plan on using external lighting for your closest macro shots with the A350, although we managed to get much better exposures on macro shots of other subjects. - Perhaps the brooch was reflecting light directly back into the flash sensor?)

Distortion
Moderate barrel distortion.

This is the tendency for the lens to bend straight lines outward (like a barrel--usually at wide angle) or inward (like a pincushion--usually at telephoto). The Fujifilm FinePix A350's 0.6% barrel distortion at wide angle is lower than average among the cameras I've tested. At the telephoto end, the A350's 0.02% barrel distortion is very low indeed.

Barrel distortion at 35mm is 0.6%

Barrel distortion at 105mm is 0.02%

Chromatic aberration
Moderately high, small effect on images at edges.

Wide: moderate, top left @ 200%	Wide: fairly bright, top right @ 200%
Tele: quite low, top left @200%	Tele: quite low, top right @200%

Chromatic aberration is rather high at wide angle, showing about 6-7 pixels of moderately bright coloration on either side of the target lines, but decreases to very low levels at telephoto focal lengths. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.)

Corner Sharpness
Some softening in the left and right corners of the frame, strongest effect in the lower right corner.

Soft in the lower left corner.	Slightly soft in top right corner.

The FinePix A350 produced soft corners in a few shots, though the lower left corner seemed to have the most visible effect. Most consumer digital camears show this effect to one degree or another, the amount shown here is more than most, but doesn't extend very far into the frame.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Moderate warm cast with both Auto and Incandescent white balance settings. Less exposure compensation required than usual.

Auto White Balance +0.6EV	Incandescent WB +0.6EV

Color balance indoors under both Auto and Incandescent lighting was just a bit warm and reddish but on the whole fairly pleasing. The FinePix A350 required a +0.6 EV exposure compensation boost to get a good exposure. Overall color well-balanced and hue accurate, a bit less than most cameras need on this shot. Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulb, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the US.

Outdoors, daylight
Good color balance, very bright colors. Better than average exposure accuracy.

Auto White Balance, Auto Exposure	Auto White Balance, Auto Exposure

Outdoor shots generally showed accurate exposure with slightly blown out highlights. Shadow detail also tended to fall apart, but nothing that would raise an alarm for a consumer digicam. Sunlit shots showed high contrast and oversaturation while overcast scenes managed a more accurate portrayal. Exposure accuracy overall was better than average, the camera requiring less exposure compensation than we're accustomed to seeing with consumer digicams.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
High resolution, 1,200 - 1,250 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to between 1,200 and 1,250 lines per picture height, with extinction at around 1,600. (The camera did produce slight color artifacts at lower line frequencies though, visible in the full-sized res target shots.) Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail. Beware that while you might be able to make out what looks like distinct lines at numbers higher than those we've mentioned here, the camera is just doing its best to continue interpreting the lines. If you zoom in and follow them from the wider portions, you'll see the lines converge and reappear several times, so the lines you see at 1,500 and higher are really only artifacts generated by the camera's imaging system.

Strong detail to 1,200-1,250 lines horizontal	Strong detail to 1,200-1,250 lines vertical

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Fairly sharp images, with some blurring of detail from noise suppression.

Pretty good definition of high-contrast elements.	Subtle detail: Hair Noise suppression tends to blur detail in areas of subtle contrast, as in the darker parts of Marti's hair here.

The FinePix A350's images are reasonably sharp, only minor over-sharpening or edge enhancement on the camera's part. (Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.)

Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears. The crop above right shows this, with darker areas of Marti's hair showing only limited detail, even though individual strands are quite visible against her cheek in the uncropped image. (The level of detail loss shown here isn't all that obvious on prints 8x10 inches or smaller though.)

ISO & Noise Performance
Moderate noise under normal lighting, increasing loss of subtle detail as ISO is boosted under low light conditions.

ISO 100	ISO 400 (w/flash)

The FinePix A350 automatically sets sensitivity between ISO 64 and 400 equivalents. Our test shots show only one setting for each setup because ISO is controlled by the camera, not the user. (The camera only went higher than ISO 100 under very dark conditions, and appears to only use the ISO 400 level for flash photos in very dark surroundings.) At ISO 100, the FinePix A350 produced moderate noise, with only slightly blurred detail in the dark areas. As the ISO setting increases, so does the noise level and the amount of blurring that results. Flash shots at ISO 400 were very noisy.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with good overall detail, but high contrast and limited shadow detail. Pretty good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images under average city street lighting and slightly darker conditions.

Normal	+0.3EV	+0.7EV

Sunlight:
Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

The FinePix A350 had a little trouble with the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above, producing very high contrast with washed-out highlights and deep shadows. Noise suppression is visible in both shadows and highlights as well, contributing to the loss of detail, made more severe in these areas. Exposure at least did not wash out the highlights when exposure compensation was set to zero adjustment. (In "real life" though, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.)

	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.5 lux	1/4 fc 2.7 lux	1/8 fc 1.3 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux
ISO 80	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8	2 sec f2.8

Low light:
Our low light testing revealed some limitations in the lens and sensor's ability to gather and process light, but the FinePix A350's performance in this area will be more than adequate for most consumers, provided they know to switch to "Night" mode for after-dark photography. The Night mode forces the ISO setting to 200 to control image noise (vs the noise that would occur at ISO 400), but permits shutter times as long as 2 seconds. The net result in Night Portrait mode was that our test images were bright as low as 1/4 foot-candle, which is about 1/4 as bright as average city street lighting at night. Color balance was slightly warm from the Auto white balance setting. The camera's autofocus system worked unusually well, able to focus on the subject down to the darkest light levels we test at. Do keep in mind though, that the very long shutter times associated with Night Landscape mode absolutely demand the use of a tripod or other camera support to get sharp photos. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Slightly oversaturated color (especially reds and blues), very typical of consumer digital cameras. Generally good hue accuracy.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. More saturated colors are located towards the periphery of the graph. Hue changes as you travel around the center. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center.

Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life. The FinePix A350 follows this trend, though it tends to overdo strong red and blue tones by quite a lot. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc. The A350 did render skin tones a bit on the pink side in most cases, but our sense is that most consumers would find the A350's bright color very appealing. (Although blue colors are just way oversaturated.)

The other important part of color rendition is hue accuracy. Hue is "what color" the color is. Here, the FinePix A350 did quite well. Like most digicams, it shifts cyan colors toward blue, to produce better-looking sky colors, but the rest of the hues were quite accurate.

See full set of test images with explanations See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Our random "Gallery" shots showed very pleasing color across a wide variety of subjects. (See our FinePix A350 Photo Gallery for more shots taken with the camera.)

Coverage
Optical viewfinder tight and skewed to the upper right. Very good accuracy from the LCD monitor.

35mm eq., optical viewfinder	105mm eq., optical viewfinder
35mm eq., LCD monitor	105mm eq., LCD monitor

The A350's optical viewfinder was quite tight, showing only 77% of the final frame area at wide angle, and 81% at telephoto zoom settings. However, the LCD monitor showed almost exactly 100 percent frame accuracy regarless of zoom position.

Coverage and Range
The A350's small flash has a limited range, and produces a slight blue cast in combination with typical incandescent room lighting. Our standard shots required more exposure compensation than average.

36mm equivalent	108mm equivalent
Normal Flash +0.9EV	Night Mode

Flash coverage was rather uneven at wide angle but very good at telephoto. In the Indoor test, the flash on the A350 underexposed our subject at its default setting, requiring a +0.9 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get reasonably bright results. (About the usual amount for this particular shot.) The camera's Night mode produced brighter results, though with a stronger pinkish-orange cast from the room lighting; no EV adjustment was required, fortunate since the EV adjustment is disabled in this mode. (But the resulting image was a little blown out.)

Even at eight feet, our closest test range, the flash illuminated the DaveBox target adequately. This agrees with FinePix's own spec of 7.9 feet for flash range, a bit on the short side, although not uncommon for a compact camera model. A much more severe issue with the A350's flash is that the camera boosts its ISO to 400 for flash shots in very dark surroundings. (Our flash tests below are shot in total darkness.) This has the benefit of boosting flash range considerably (doubling it relative to performance at ISO 100), but at a terrible cost in image noise. Flash shot from the A350 captured in very dark surroundings really aren't usable for anything above 4x6 inch snapshot prints, and will look a little rough even at that modest size.

8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft	12 ft	13 ft	14 ft
1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400	1/30 sec f4.7 ISO 400

Print Quality
Good print quality, great color, very usable 11x14 inch prints. ISO 400 images are very soft at 8x10, acceptable at 5x7, great at 4x6.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon i9900 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5000 here in the office. (See the Canon i9900 review for details on that model.)

With the FinePix A350, we found that it had enough resolution to make very crisp 8x10 inch prints. At 11x14, its prints were a bit softer looking, but more than adequate for wall or table display. At high ISO, image noise levels are held in check, but at the cost of rather soft-looking images. ISO 200 photos look OK printed at 8x10 inches, but ISO 400 ones are marginal even at 5x7 inches, but look fine at 4x6. Color-wise, the FinePix A350's images looked really great when printed on the i9900, with bright, vibrant color. Users who prefer more subdued, technically accurate color saturation levels may find the A350's images a little too bright, but most consumers will probably find the A350's bright, snappy images very appealing.

FinePix A350 Timing
Average to slow speed for a consumer camera.

Startup/Shutdown:
Power On to first shot	3.1 seconds
Shutter response (Lag Time):
Full Autofocus Wide	0.92 second
Full Autofocus Tele	1.64 second
Prefocused	0.3 second
Cycle time (shot to shot)
Normal large/fine JPEG	3.57 seconds
Flash recycling	7 seconds
Continuous mode	0.88 second 1.13 frames/second (5 large/fine frames)
Download speed
Windows Computer, USB 2.0	829 KBytes/sec

The A350's performance ranges from just average to slow, depending on what you're trying to do. Start up falls in the average range. Shutter response when the lens is set to its wide angle position is slightly slower than average. At the telephoto end of the lens' range, the lag time of 1.64 second is much slower than average. On the other hand, if you "prefocus" the camera by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure, it's much faster, with a shutter delay of 0.3 second, about average for inexpensive point & shoot digital cameras. Shot-to-shot cycle times are also on the slow side of average, at 3.57 seconds for large/fine JPEGs. There is no buffer memory, all shots are this speed, regardless of how many you've snapped in succession. Continuous-mode speed is average, at a bit over one frames/second, for up to five shots in succession. The flash takes about seven seconds to recharge after a full-power shot, about average for this class of camera. Connected to a computer, download speeds are fast enough (828 KB/second) that you probably won't feel a need for a separate card reader, but nonetheless aren't as fast as many cameras currently on the market. Bottom line, while not a first choice for sports or other fast-paced action, the A350 is responsive enough (particular at wide angle lens settings) to handle most family photo opportunities.

See full Picky Details page.

Battery
Pretty good battery life.

Operating Mode	Battery Life
Still-image capture mode LCD on	152 minutes
Still-image capture mode LCD off	168 minutes
Image playback LCD on	372 minutes

The FinePix A350 uses two AA batteries for power. The table above shows maximum run times based on our power measurements and standard 1600 mAH Ni-MH batteries (although higher capacity batteries are now available, so you can expect run times up to 25% longer than those shown). With a worst-case run time of over two and a half hours, the A350 does better than average in this department. (But do plan on purchasing a couple of sets of high-capacity NiMH rechargeable batteries and a good-quality charger along with the camera.)

Storage
A 16-MB xD-Picture Card is included with the FinePix A350.

Image Capacity with 16-MB xD Picture Card		Fine
2,592 x 1,944	Images	6
	File Size	2.5MB
2,048 x 1,536	Images	20
	File Size	788K
1,600 x 1,200	Images	25
	File Size	626K
640 x 480	Images	124
	File Size	128K

I strongly recommend buying at least a 128MB card, preferably a 256MB one, to give yourself extra space for extended outings.

See full Picky Details page.