Travel gadget: Fuji Finepix F200

A Fuji Finepix F200 EXR digital camera. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Photography can be a noisy pastime. I'm not talking about the babble of a Bangkok market, the roar of Niagara Falls or the clatter of the New York subway, but noise you can actually see.

When shooting in low-light situations, most digital cameras can't handle it, which often results in severe pixilation of the image, camera shake or both.

A few high-end professional cameras are beginning to silence the noise, but the compact market still has a way to go, the inherent problem being the small size of the digital sensor and the arrangement of the light receptors.

Now Fuji has come up with the Super CCD EXR that changes the pattern of different coloured receptors resulting in less information loss in the stored image and less noise in the final picture.

The results are pretty good in a wide range of light conditions, but it really pulls ahead of the field in poorly lit and high-contrast scenes.

The features on this little camera are impressive, with 5X optical zoom, video, scene modes, manual control and special EXR modes that really come to the party when most other cameras relyon the flash.

The flash works well enough, too, and really impresses with bright backlit subjects in a special Natural mode: it takes two images - one flashed, one not - and recombines them to produce a perfectly exposed shot.

The F200 is priced at $699, which puts it in the mid-range of the compact market, challenging cameras twice the price. Its weaknesses are a slow f3.5 lens, lack of RAW image storage and the absence of a hot shoe for external flash.

In a congested and confusing market, the new Finepix really deserves to be heard.