Digital Trends

Face Detection is all the rage for 2007 digicams. Fujifilm can take credit for it since the company put the technology on the map late last year with the introduction of the FinePix S6000fd and F31fd. Although other companies tried it, Fujifilm refined Face Detection by incorporating the circuit in hardware rather than software. This made it more accurate and faster, per Fujifilm’s claims. Now everyone else has jumped on the bandwagon and is hyping the feature. Simply stated Face Detection looks for human eyes, nose and mouth then adjusts to capture them in focus with the proper lighting and exposure. In the case of Fujifilm, it looks for up to 10 faces in a frame, compared to eight of the Sony DSC-T100, and fewer by other cameras. Note: it only works with humans; forget a cute portrait of dogs, cats or parakeets—you’ll need the new HP Photosmart R837 for that. With the FinePix F31fd, Face Detection has a dedicated on/off key rather than making you use onscreen menus to adjust the setting. Beyond the “fd,” this digicam has a 6.3-megapixel CCD, a 3x optical zoom, long battery life and a stratospheric ISO (3200). Now let’s see if this camera is worth the money.