Getting past megapixel madness, check out both the exposure control and sensitivity of this the FujiFilm's F30. I mean aperture and shutter priority on an inexpensive point-and-shoot? Aperture priority gives you control over depth of field, thus helping you keep portions of your images in or out of focus as you wish. Shutter priority helps freeze moving objects and prevent images that show camera shake. Both of these exposure options work great. Setting one or the other is really easy.

ISO 1600 and 3200 are not the meat of point-and-shoot digital cameras. I have taken quite usable photos with the F30 at 3200 ISO, for example for an article I did on the Consumer Electronics Show in early January 2007. I've included one of the photos from the article just below. You can see the other two here.

Sure, F30 images at 3200 harbour some noise, but they're better than anything I've seen on even an inexpensive digital SLR. And, who ever heard of ISO 3200 or 1600 on an under £200 / €300 point-and-shoot?

If ISO 3200 and 1600 give you perfectly acceptable photos, ISO 100 - 400 yield excellent images and ISO 800 is quite good as well. With most point-and-shoots in this and even higher price categories, you're lucky to get good images at ISO 100.

The F30 takes around 3 seconds from the time you press the power button until you're ready to shoot a picture. That's a bit slow. However, the camera has minimal shutter lag, the time between the time you press the shutter button and a picture is recorded. That's very important if you take pictures of moving objects such as cars, animals and children.

One other pro feature I like is the easy way you get out of the image viewing function. You press a button on the back of the camera to view the images you've taken. To get out of image view, you press the shutter button down a bit and, zonk!, you're back and ready to shoot. My Canon SD700 IS point-and-shoot requires me to turn a dial to view images I've taken and then to return the dial to the proper exposure control setting. When I am rushed, I tend to miss the right setting when turning the dial back. So, I especially like the F30's simple method of escaping image viewing.