Fuji's latest camera is in your face
- — 17 July, 2006 10:06
Forget the background: the face is the focus of Fuji's new FinePix S6000fd digital camera launched on Thursday.
The 6.3 megapixel camera prioritizes focus and exposure for human faces, resulting in better group pictures and individual portraits, the company said.
"If it's a portrait shot, it will ensure subjects of a photo are on the sharpest focus and exposure," said Andy LaGuardia, a Fuji spokesman. It takes the camera 0.05 seconds to find a human face and adjust the focus so the subject is clear and well-exposed.
The camera, which has a 2.5-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) screen and a 10.7X optical zoom lens, incorporates the company's Face Detection Technology, which can find as many as 10 faces in a picture, LaGuardia said. The closest face to the lens is ranked and each rank is given the related focus and exposure, he said.
The face-detection feature is part of a larger system in the camera, LaGuardia said. It works in tandem with other components to adjust the focus, exposure and flash to ensure the faces look best. A button on the camera turns the face-detection feature off.
It has internal memory of 10M bytes and shoots about seven minutes of 320-by-240-pixel video at 30 frames per second. It runs on four AA batteries.
The camera measures 5.2 by 3.8 by 5.0 inches (13.2 by 9.65 by 12.7 centimeters) and weighs 21.2 ounces (601 grams). It supports PictBridge, standard technology that allows printing of images directly from a memory card or camera.
The US$499 camera will become available worldwide in September.
Fuji also announced the smaller and lighter FinePix F20 digital camera on Thursday. The 6.3-megapixel point-and-shoot camera has a 3X optical zoom and weighs 5.3 ounces (150 grams). It will be available in August for US$299.
