The first thing I noticed about this camera was the 10 mega pixels sticker, impressed, the second was just how compact it was, it really was handbag or, in my case, back pocket sized. And that despite it's pink colour (luckily for me it comes in four other colours Red, Blue, Green and Black) it looked very durable and sturdy.

The instructions were very easy to read, written in plain English with clear pictures and arranged in an order that made sense.

Often the thing that annoys me most about a digital camera is the shutter lag - the time it takes between pressing the shutter button and the image actually being captured. So I was very excited to see a high speed shooting feature and continuous capture settings.

I immediately started to imagine the whirring of paparazzi style shots, however, I managed to restrain myself and test out what the shutter lag was like without these settings enabled. The first click and in just over a second a very clear high quality picture appeared on the screen (about two seconds in a room with low lighting). If it was that quick on just on the auto settings I wondered what it would be like when I enabled the high speed and continuous shooting features...

Firstly I tested the high speed shooting feature and with about the same amount of shutter lag, just over one second, I was able to capture very clear pictures of people walking quickly past me in the street.

Next for the continuous shooting option, the camera is supposed to continue capturing photos for as long as the shutter button is pressed down. Unfortunately, this feature was a bit of a disappointment, I didn't get the paparazzi effect I'd been hoping for. There was little difference between not having this setting enabled and continuously pressing the shutter button - there was still a lag of just over a second as the camera refocused and then captured.

The camera also features an Intelligent Face Detection and Red Eye Removal setting to automatically detect a face anywhere in the frame for shots that emphasise portrait subjects. This setting worked really well and found the faces every time leaving no red eyes!

Still pictures can be shared using the cameras inbuilt infra red transmission to any device that supports high speed infra red or IR simple, such as certain cameras, printers and televisions. After parading the camera around my home I quickly discovered I did not have any equipment with IR communication and so I am not able to comment on how effective this technology is. However I wasn't too disappointed as I couldn't really envision myself having much use for the feature anyway. Although, if someone was away from home without the cables I can see it may prove handy.

I was very impressed with the movie mode. It was easy to start recording, just one click of a button on the top of the camera. The image quality was a lot higher than I expected with a depth and clarity that took me by surprise and the sound quality was simply amazing! The length of movie the camera is able to record is dependant upon the size of the memory and with a 4GB card it could be up to a whopping 640 mins, although unfortunately, fast forward and rewind are not available in playback mode.

So, would I buy it? Yes definitely, mainly for the high quality of pictures, it's compactness and the quickness of photo capture.

Available from www.fujifilm.co.uk