Fuji A500 - A cheap buy

This is a compact digital camera from Fuji featuring the dreaded infamous Fuji SuperCCD. A brief intro on the inner workings of the sensor are needed. In order to reduce prices on cameras the manufacturers are trying to

1) Reduce sensor size to contain costs.
2) Squeeze as many pixels as possible on the already small area and claim a ridiculous high pixels count.

Whatever physicians are not decided yet if light is made of waves or photons one thing is clear: you need some surface to receive it and convert to a intelligible signal. The results of the manifacturer's policy on the other hand produce small sensitivity (noise in all the pictures) problems in declared picture quality.

Fuji excels in these tasks. The unfortunate SuperCCD has a bare 3.1 million pixels (NOT A 5.1 Mega pixel then ) disposed as hexagons to save space! This allows Fuji to claim 5.1 mega pixel after interpolating the sensor output. Of course the result can’t compete with any actual 5.1 megapixel camera. It can maybe compete with a 3 Mpxel. This is particularly noticeable when you recompress the pictures with a graphic program (like photoshop) and usulallu save half the space on disk while retaining the same quality.

ACTUAL CAMERA REVIEW
The camera is very compact. I noticed it does actually feel good in my hand. It's rather easy to use and the menu is nice. On the positives sides it uses 2AA batteries and it can come handy if you happen to run out of juice during your shooting.

Either the sensor is bad or the lens are under sized, it just doesn't get enough light to shoot noise free pictures. I won't say that the quality is bad but they are not made for enlargements. Pictures taken even at the lowest ISO and in full light show some noise in the midtones. Night shooting is poor and the menus won't help much because you can't get into aperture times. (There is a manual mode but you can set just exposure and White Balance)

Focussing speed is slow. This tricks most people, specially beginners, to shoot pictures at their feet rather than the subject. The problem is worsened because the screen freezes when the button is pressed half-way tricking people into thinking that the photo has been taken (instead the camera only focused).

When charging the flash the LCD is turn off so you can't take advantage of the extra time to compose the next shot. Did I mention that the flash takes ages to charge? You can expect pauses up to 4 seconds.

Finally movie mode is ridiculous . 10 FPS at 320*240 without sound. This is worse than a 10 year’s old webcam –The lack of sound makes it superfluous.