Introduction

Ease of Use

Upon opening the box, you're faced with the basic user guide for the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 which is a fold-out guide with cartoon images showing you how to load the battery and fit the wrist strap. There's also a safety handbook informing you about the water resistance of the camera and essentially advising you not to lose it down the Mariana Trench. Along with this paperwork, the camera is supplied with a CD which holds the full manual in a variety of languages and FinePix Studio viewing software version 2.4.

Scrabble beneath these and you get to the rest of the stuff included in the box. Aside from the camera, there's a wrist strap, charging plug and USB cable. The cable acts as a means to get pictures onto your computer and as a charging cable. It plugs into the charging plug and into the camera. The great news is you can charge off your – or any – computer computer, too. There's also an NP-45a lithium ion battery that Fujifilm says has a life of around 200 shots as long as the camera is kept in Auto mode. That will likely also include not looking at the screen to review pictures you've taken so in reality, this will be a smaller number.

Front	Rear

The design of the XP60 is typical of Fujifilm waterproof cameras and other manufacturers too. There seems to be this need to make the camera look as though it's covered in armour as well as giving it the appearance of being designed like a submarine by placing rivets on the front of the camera. We described it as slim and it is, although it's certainly been padded out to make it shock-proof. It can still be fitted into a pocket, but it needs to have that extra protection.

Speaking of protection, the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 has been improved slightly against the XP50 which – we assume – is a replacement, but is most likely a step up in the range. After all, it's not just the 6m waterproofing that's better than the XP50's 5m. The resolution is a slightly higher 16 megapixel compared to 14 megapixel on the XP50. Is that necessary though? Well it's negligible in terms of viewing the pictures. You may see a difference in the maximum size you can print to. The XP50 has a FSI-CMOS sensor as do the other Outdoor range of cameras. It's not specified on the XP60 specifications, so we can only assume that the sensor is also Front Side Illuminated. We'd normally go on the fact that a BSI sensor is newer technology and therefore shouted about. It's interesting that Fujifilm have labelled their sensors as FSI, given that all standard sensors are FSI.

Water-proof	Front

Being part of the Outdoor range, the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 boasts resistance to a number of problems that would normally wreck a digital compact camera. As well as the waterproofing to 6m (20ft) and shock-proofing to 1.5m (5ft or around mid-chest high on an average adult), the XP60 is also freeze-proof to -10ºC (14ºF) and dust-proof thanks to the same resistance that keeps water at bay. These features along with other USP's reinforces the camera as a companion for the traveller. Because when you add the protection to the built-in charger, fuel efficient CMOS sensor, SDXC memory card and anti-reflective coating on the LCD screen, It looks like it could handle any situation.

Build quality is exceptional. Let's face it, if it's not built to a high degree then it's Sod's Law that it will fail when you're scuba diving around MV Keith Tibbetts off the coast of Grand Cayman. The quality of the lens will be seen in during the test shots but we always wonder about the quality of the glass that sits in front of the lens to keep the water out. It will be multi coated to reduce flare and ghosting but what about chromatic aberrations or light dispersion? Arguably, it will be negligible and putting it into context, will the buyer of a camera at this price really care?

Despite being designed for underwater photography, the buttons are surprisingly small. They're bigger than you'd expect on a normal digital compact camera, but small for one that's to be used underwater – possibly with gloves. They feel firm and press in with a definite action so you can tell it's done even while not looking at it or if you were underwater.

Lockable Cover	Weather-sealed Cover

The flash has been placed nearer the centre of the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 due to taking macro or marine photographs. The light will be more even for that type of photography but portraits could suffer from red-eye.

All the openings on the camera have been placed on one side of the camera which is covered with a watertight covering that umbrellas the whole side of the camera. The clasp is a wheel that has to be turned 90º to open while holding down a button in the centre. It sounds long winded but prevents accidental opening of the cover which would ruin the camera completely.

The menu system is minimal on the XP60 which is likely to prevent confusion and speed up using the camera when under water or in extreme cold. The Main menu is opened by pressing the centre button on the pad. There are two tabs for Shooting and Setup. The Shooting menu accesses the most used options such as resolution, ISO, white-balance and FinePix Colour while the Setup menu has more in-depth options such as date & time, language, format the card and operation volume. The menu is easy enough to see. The colours are bright and there's a good deal of contrast. Thanks will go to the anti-reflective screen for making it easier to see. Fujifilm could take the opportunity to play around with the menu system making graphics bigger – or even taking over from text completely.

Memory Card Slot	Battery Compartment

From a cold start, the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is great. We managed to switch the camera on, focus and take a picture in just over 1.6 seconds. Nearly a second faster than standard digital compact cameras. There are a number of continuous modes on the XP60. They're in the Main menu and there's four continuous modes and two Final modes. The Final modes will start taking pictures when you start holding the button down but it will only save the last few once you bring the button back up. The continuous modes get progressively faster and are burst types firing a quick succession of images instead of plodding at a reasonable rate. 

As with the Main menu, Fujifilm haven't messed with the playback system. It works the same way showing images full size with basic information on the screen. This can be rotated through various options to remove it if necessary or only show images tagged as favourites. The Playback menu has the usual additions that Fujifilm put in recently such as the Photobook Assist and Image search. There's also some basic editing options to adjust brightness, contrast, colour and sepia. Video and pictures can be marked for upload to YouTube, Facebook and/or MyFinePix.com. Should you take a picture and discover that red-eye was present and it wasn't seen before, it is possible to remove it in the Playback menu. You can also do all the standard stuff such as Protect, Crop, Resize and Rotate images.

Image Quality

All of the sample images in this review were taken using the 16 megapixel JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 7Mb.

Noise

Low ISO images look a little bitty from mild noise which is a little annoying. However, looking at it from a more optimistic point of view, the fact that they've decided not to use noise reduction means the image is less tarnished and obviates the painted look that NR can create. Still, at ISO 100 we'd expect to have a smoother image even without NR sorting things out. Interestingly, moving into ISO 200 shows little or – arguably – no change in image quality despite a stop exposure difference. Small amounts of noise start to move into the darker areas of the frame at ISO 400, but in all fairness, it's only really noticeable at full magnification of the image.

The major changes start at ISO 800 which is pretty high for a compact. Normally we'd expect to see a big shift in image quality at ISO 400. Image quality begins to break down at ISO 800, though. Noise is a lot more noticeable and edge detail begins to break up while sharp edges start to fuzz out. This problem exacerbates through the next stage although viewed from a normal viewing distance, the image quality still looks great with no colour casts trying to take over the image.

There must have been an issue by ISO 3200 because the image is practically black & white. Most colour has been removed or desaturated in a bid to remove colour noise. This leaves only edge sharpness breaking down further and salt & pepper noise being an issue. Incredibly, the ISO 6400 image looks great. WE say this because a compact camera sensor at that ISO setting should have a horrid blue cast and be riddled with blue and green blobs of colour. It is bad on the highest ISO setting, but it's the best we've seen in a long time.

ISO 100 (100% Crop)	ISO 200 (100% Crop)
ISO 400 (100% Crop)	ISO 800 (100% Crop)
ISO 1600 (100% Crop)	ISO 3200 (100% Crop)
ISO 6400 (100% Crop)

Focal Range

The focal range of the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is 5mm – 25mm or 28-140mm in 35mm terms. That's a 5x optical zoom. We didn't see any barrel distortion that we felt we should be concerned with. In fact it was slightly lower than what we expected to see.

28mm	140mm

Sharpening

The Fujifilm FinePix XP60 doesn't have any built-in sharpening tools so if you wish to sharpen the images, you need to use an external editing suite such as Adobe Photoshop. We used the standard sharpen setting in our test using CS4. We found that because of the lack of noise control to smooth out images, sharpening simply made the roughness of the noise that was present even worse. Images appear to be sharp enough anyway.

Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)

File quality

At full resolution on the fine setting, a typical image from the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is around 7Mb while simply knocking it down to the normal setting drops the file size down to less than 4Mb.

14M Fine (7.35Mb) (100% Crop)	14M Normal (3.89Mb) (100% Crop)

Chromatic Aberrations

Chroma is handled well on the Fujifilm FinePix XP60. We did find traces of it, but it's only mild and at the extreme edges of the frame. It's entirely possible that the noise present on the images could be also breaking up the chroma, in a way, as it breaks up any clean lines.

Chromatic Aberrations 1 (100% Crop)	Chromatic Aberrations 2 (100% Crop)
Chromatic Aberrations 3 (100% Crop)

Macro

Close focusing of the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is 9cm in the macro mode. That's paltry compared to some cameras, but let's look at this from the point of view that this is a camera designed for underwater photography, not taking pictures of interesting lizards on a rock. It's highly unlikely you'll get close enough to any wildlife while scuba diving to get a picture of the lining of it's eye, so there's little point in having a good close focusing fitted.

Macro	Macro (100% Crop)

Flash

The flash is situated more centrally on the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 than on a standard compact camera and this is to enable direct light with a reduction of shadows when photographing underwater. It does create vignettes, which is a shame. The vignettes do start to dissipate as the zoom is used.

Flash Off - Wide Angle (28mm)	Flash On - Wide Angle (28mm)
Flash Off - Telephoto (140mm)	Flash On - Telephoto (140mm)

Because of this central location, it's more square on to eyes when shooting portraits and red-eye is an issue because of this. The Red-eye reduction feature works well, but it would be worth running it through an editing suite as well.

Flash On	Flash On (100% Crop)
Red Eye Reduction	Red Eye Reduction (100% Crop)

Night

In Program mode, the night shot can't be taken because the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 won't take a long enough exposure. There are two night scenes: With Tripod or Without. Using the Without option will use a lower ISO to smooth the image. Despite taking our test image in the wee hours, we found that the image is still over exposed. On the other hand, the Program mode shot is drastically under exposed and also out of focus.

Night Auto	Night Auto (100% Crop)
Night Scene	Night Scene (100% Crop)

Sample Images

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Product Images

Front of the Camera

Front of the Camera

Front of the Camera

Front of the Camera

Front of the Camera / Isometric View

Front of the Camera / Isometric View

Rear of the Camera

Rear of the Camera / Turned On

Rear of the Camera / Filter Menu

Rear of the Camera / Main Menu

Rear of the Camera / Main Menu

Rear of the Camera / Battery Chamber Warning

Top of the Camera

Bottom of the Camera

Side of the Camera

Side of the Camera

Front of the Camera

Memory Card Slot / Battery Compartment

Memory Card Slot / Battery Compartment

Memory Card Slot

Battery Compartment

Conclusion

The Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is a capable little camera. It seems that every thought has gone into how to make it as travel friendly as possible. Fujifilm have also squeezed as much tech into it as they can for the price they wanted to sell it at. The waterproof protection is better than most other digital compacts and matches them with the other areas. It looks nice - especially the electric blue colour that we got as a test sample. The layout of lens in the top corner has been tried and tested for around 10 years now. It means the camera will remain slim even while zooming and most importantly for an underwater camera, everything is sealed inside the body.

Other features suited to the travelling photographer are the built-in charger which is great for space strapped bags. Should you wish to reduce the amount of memory you take, the SDXC compatibility will allow larger capacities of card. However, this has dangers of losing a lot of photographs if the card corrupts or you lose the camera/card. The start up time and some of the burst modes are very fast which is great for candid street scenes. The anti-reflective screen will be great for snorkelling as well as taking pictures in bright light. This also reduces the amount of battery power drainage caused by brightening screens to counter glare.

We're unsure of the lack of noise control on the pictures. Noise is quite bad from the lowest ISO setting but doesn't seem to get much worse as the settings are raised. We think with a little NR, the image quality would increase greatly.

The price varies depending on retailer but for an average price of around £179, the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 is a good little camera. You get some decent features built in while any issues that surround it, such as the centrally located flash producing red-eye and having an awesome red-eye reduction feature. If you're looking to go on your travels and you want a little camera that has some decent features, the XP60 will suit your needs. While the image quality isn't the best due to the absent noise-reduction, it makes up for it in other areas.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	4.5
Ease-of-use	4
Image quality	3.5
Value for money	4

Review Roundup

Reviews of the Fujifilm FinePix XP60 from around the web.

Specifications

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