Flash (internal / external)

The Fuji MX2900 features two flash options, the internal pop-up flash offers good results and is small and neat enough to tuck itself away when not in use. The MX-2900 also (sensibly) features a flash hot-shoe which will accept a "normal" 35mm flash unit. The Canon 380EX for my Pro 70 wouldn't fit, but an older Olympus unit did and worked pretty well.

The images below are examples of the internal flash.

Long distance flash test; good, even coverage	Skin tone flash test; good skin tones, no wash-out here	Close-up (not quite macro) flash test, the internal flash measured well and didn't over-expose this difficult subject

The images below are a comparison of internal flash vs. external flash.

Shot taken using internal flash, fairly well exposed if dropping of a little on the right-hand edge.	Shot taken with external flash, much brighter and better coverage if a little blue cast.

Another useful feature is the ability to control the internal flash by -0.6 EV, -0.3 EV, +0.3 EV or +0.6 EV. This additional control over the flash makes the MX2900 an ideal candidate for flash and flash portrait shots. (The three manual focused - ie. out-of-focus; sorry, shots below were taken at different internal flash adjustments).

Internal flash, adjusted -0.6 EV	Internal flash, no adjustment	Internal flash, adjusted +0.6 EV

Digital Zoom

Readers of my reviews will know I'm not a huge fan of digital zoom as it's often a badly implemented and seldom used (by owners) marketing "ploy" to sell cameras which don't have an optical zoom. The MX2900 executes digital zoom by simply cropping the center portion from the CCD and storing a lower resolution image. It's up to you do what you will with the image.

No digital zoom (1600 x 1200) - rotated	Digital zoom, 1.2x (1280 x 1024) - rotated	Digital zoom, 2.5x (640 x 480) - rotated

TIFF / JPEG Compression modes

The MX2900 supports four image compression modes, Hi (TIFF), Fine (JPEG), Normal (JPEG) and Basic (JPEG). Below you can find crops of the same shot in each image format for comparison purposes (click on the crop for the full size image - warning, the TIFF is *big*).

HI, TIFF: 4258KB	FINE, JPEG: 824KB	NORMAL, JPEG: 411KB	BASIC, JPEG: 206KB

Manual features

Using the manual exposure mode of the MX2900 you can achieve Aperture or Shutter Priority and also a full manual mode, the following combinations are possible:

This allows for a certain amount of flexibility and control over the camera. The MX2900 also features a quick-to-access manual focus mode (Kudos Fuji) by simply holding the SHIFT button and pressing the UP or DOWN arrows you can switch to manual focus mode and focus in or out, hit CANCEL to return to Auto Focus.

This long exposure was taken in manual mode at F4 / 1.2 seconds.

Continuous mode

Switching to continuous mode on the MX2900 locks resolution down to 640 x 480 and JPEG compression to BASIC, the camera then shoots at about 1.5fps for up to 9 frames, displays them as a 3 x 3 grid on the display and stores them as about 45KB each.