Fujifilm Finepix J38 12MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom and 2.7 inch LCD

I wanted a camera that was simple but still had a great quality for the type and for the price. i got an absolutely great picture. lets face it, most people are not profession photographers and do not need expensive 500 to who knows how expensive those cameras get. if you just want to take some pictures for memories or anything else that is not too crazy, then this is the camera for you. have had this camera for a month now, the battery life is perfect. the features are pretty simple to use and fun to mess around with. using panorama you definitely have to be careful to shoot it steady since sometimes the camera has a hard time piecing together the three photos. but when the panorama comes out correctly it looks amazing. this does close up shots very well and they are pretty damn clear. i was going to use this for snowboarding as well but havent gotten around to that yet. although it has a sport feature with an increased shutter speed. also havent played with the video much but its fine there. you cannot zoom in after you start but hey, if you want an hd video camera then buy one of those. overall great camera for a great value on a budget. id recommend.

I unpacked this awesome little camera a few hours ago, and have been putting it through some paces. Overall, I'm impressed.I'll start with the good. The portability is top-notch. To give perspective, its about a 1/3" shorter and twice as thick as my classic iPod, and roughly the same, dainty weight. The screen, while beautiful, will absorb fingerprints, so a cleansing cloth is a must if you're nitpicky. There are a grand total of eleven buttons on the camera, all of them about as ergonomically pleasing as you can get with a rectangle.Now on still shots, it's been my experience that Fuji products tend to jack up the ISO on Auto mode. The J38 is no different. This will result in some noise, in any camera, but unless you go looking for it, there's no real glaring problem here. The pictures will look fine if you feel like having them printed out, and don't go over them with a magnifying lens. The Scene Recognition Auto - a setting that decides what the shot should be taken as - is good in theory but so far has been iffy indoors. I've gotten a few unwanted flashes with my pictures that I considered well lit.Luckily, for all those snobs who want the finest Finepix, the manual mode is pretty deep, considering the point-and-shoot type of camera this is. You can change the ISO (100 will produce excellent photos in decent light), the exp. compensation, and the White Balance, along with turning the face recognition on or off. The results of tinkering will usually be obvious from the screen, so this will help ease newbies into exploring the camera's true capabilities. (A note: the macro mode is adequate but not mindblowing, and there is no super-macro mode)Oh yeah, the screen. You're stuck with it, because there's no viewfinder to be found on this model, but for me that's a moot point. This type of camera is the kind you hold out in front of you and snap a picture. But the screen's only real drawback is the speed as which it "draws" your picture to be. There's just a hint of lag, nothing bad at all, but it will go blurry with fast movement, and at the moment I'm not sure if this affects the focus. I doubt it would.Video is more than I was expecting. The quality is a smidge above your average professional Youtube video, and stays in pretty good focus as you move. I have a feeling really fast movement might become a blur, but so far it's been on the ball with recording. Oh, while the zoom doesn't work while recording (bummer), the built-in microphone seemed to pick up things rather well. I fussed with the buttons while recording, and the clicks and taps on the camera body were picked up a little too good: keep a firm, unmoving grip and you should be good to go.Internal memory is severely lacking. Like, three 12MP pictures and it's full. Be sure to pick up a decent SD card, and you won't have any problems. My 2-gig card can hold over six hundred pictures, or over thirty minutes of footage, and the higher memory SDs are pretty cheap.I'm totally happy with my purchase. For 100 dollars, I got a camera that needs considerably less of a babying through than my others. That said, it will take a degree of time for a newbie to get the best pictures out of the camera, so an optimistic outlook is needed. For those who are in a hurry to snap something good, or the semi-veteran who doesn't feel like lugging around his bigger camera, this is a great point-and-shoot with some (eventually) foolproof features.

I bought this camera for my teenage son for Christmas. Four months later, after using it no more than 3 or 4 times, the flimsy piece of plastic that holds the battery in place broke, so now the camera is unusable. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this part is not covered by warranty. With no repair centers in Massachusetts, our only option is to pay shipping to send it to Fuji and await a repair estimate. I think I'll try to fix it with superglue instead... For a $100 camera I find this outrageous. The other digital cameras in our family are Canons, and they have worked for years without any problems. I would never buy another Fuji camera again!

I was excited to receive this camera - very small, light, attractive, good features. However, I tried about every combination of shooting mode and flash mode - and there are quite a few - and found it impossible to get a good photo of my kids indoors. Not one! Every single photo was extremely noisy, almost all had fairly severe redeye even with the redeye reduction flash, and most of them were either blurry or dark. Viewing the photos on the camera LCD they look fine. Put them on the computer zoomed out to fit the screen and they look sort of OK. Zoom to 1:1 and they look terrible.Maybe it would take great outdoor photos, I don't know, but if you're going to do a lot of indoor photography like I do, I don't recommend this one. I'll be figuring out how to do a return on it. No idea how the positive reviewers got good photos out of this.

Take OK pictures and can be slow at times -- especially when focusing. Ever since getting an iPhone, I don't bother using this anymore.