Additional Features
Contents
This camera focuses on ease of use, but also has good functionality. The FinePix A150 includes a Face Detection technology that track faces and adjusts the focus and exposure settings to feature the face. It also does a good job of erasing red eye in your pictures automatically.
The A150 also features Picture Stabilization. This stabilization works well to correct light sensitivity and shutter speeds, but it doesn’t do much for a shaky hand.
You can choose to shoot at the full 10-megepixels, or at several smaller image sizes.
This camera has fourteen scene positions for various shooting situations. They are: Natural Light, Baby, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Museum, Party, Night, Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Flower, and Text. The A150 also has an automatic scene selection, but we found this to be occasionally inaccurate. It may be better to set the scene yourself. The scene positions can be set with a few button presses. The on-screen scene menu can be seen in Figure 8. Once the scene is chosen the camera automatically selects the appropriate shutter speed, exposure, and white balance to suit the scene.
Figure 8: Scene mode choices.
Besides the 3x optical zoom, the A150 also has a 5.7x digital zoom. As you may know from previous reviews, we find digital zoom a negligible feature and usually turn it off since the optical zoom provides much clearer pictures.
In addition to stills, you can also create your own movies with sound with this camera. The QVGA Movie Mode takes video clips at 30 frames per second. Video resolution ranges between 640 x 480 pixels, 320 x 240 pixels. You won’t be showing high def movies with this camera, but you will be able to take simple videos for thing like posting online. We were impressed with the audio quality of the videos. Also the fact that when you play a slide show of your photos on the camera, the videos play as well. This can be a nice feature when previewing (or showing off) your work.
The camera’s macro mode is quite good allowing you to take a picture of objects or subjects as close as 4" (10 cm).