Size, Shape & Weight
I like to use cameras designed "to my hand", i.e. I'm not a great fan of miniaturising. Now nobody can say the S602 Zoom is a miniature camera. Yet if I compare it to my first digicam, a HP Photosmart c912 - some of you might know it by the name Pentax EI-2000 -, which is probably the most ergonomically designed camera of all times, the S602 Zoom feels a tad small and lightweight. There are lots of manual control switches, dials and buttons, which is great on one hand because you need not dig deep into the menu to set something; on the other hand, it is almost inevitable that you touch one or the other involuntarily from time to time because the camera body is too small to accommodate so many controls AND provide enough space for your thumbs and fingers. Likewise, the camera could use an extra 100 or 200 grams, which would increase its inertia, giving it a bit more stability. That said, the S602 Zoom is not a badly designed camera, and is certainly much more of a pleasure to use than a compact digicam.

Exposure Modes
On the Auto mode I cannot comment, because I have never used it. The P mode, which on most cameras offers little extra control if compared to the fully automatic mode, has a very pleasing feature on the S602 Zoom: the camera calculates an aperture-shutter speed pair for you, but you can then use the control dial to bias it towards either a smaller aperture for increased depth of field OR a faster shutter speed to avoid camera shake and freeze motion - WITHOUT changing the exposure. (Of course, exposure compensation is also possible, in 1/3 EV increments, but that's another thing.) There are also the semi-automatic S and A modes, found in most film SLRs and lots of digicams, but unfortunately, in P, S and A modes you cannot use the full range of shutter speeds - this is saved for the M (manual exposure) mode. The amazing thing here is that you can select shutter speeds as fast as 1/10,000 of a second! Wow!

Zoom
The S602 Zoom is equipped with a 6x optical zoom lens, which you can use by pushing one of two buttons on the back of the camera. I'm not a great fan of "power zooms"; in fact I only like lenses with a mechanically linked zoom ring. Therefore it hasn't been easy for me to get accustomed to this less natural way of controlling focal distance. The most annoying thing was that it was easy to slip into the digital zoom range, which really corrupted image quality. (If you zoom continuously, the zooming stops at the telephoto end of the optical zoom range, and you only enter the digital zoom range if you press the right button again - BUT if you zoom a bit, pause, then zoom again etc. then you have to watch the zoom indicator closely so as not to activate digital zooming against your will.) Apparently there is no way to switch the digital zoom feature completely off. At any rate, the optical zoom range of 35-210mm (equiv.) is enough for most purposes - if you need more wide angle, you can purchase a 0.79x focal distance converter. Pincushion distortion at telephoto is not noticeable on "normal" photos, barrel distortion at wide angle is rather significant, but it's nothing I couldn't live with.

AF & MF
Under normal lighting conditions, the auto focus system works reliably. The AF is not very fast, which makes it difficult to take candids at a wedding for instance, but with the focus locked, the shutter lag time is relatively short. Sadly enough, the AF has no "continuous" or "tracking" mode, which is a big let down as you cannot take full advantage of the camera's excellent burst mode because of it. In low-light circumstances, the performance of the AF system is rather poor, as there is no AF assist lamp or laser beam. I'm not a great fan of flash preflashes being used in lieu of an AF assist lamp, but it's still better than nothing - and this camera won't do it. Because of this the camera will focus on the wall behind the subject all too often, yielding rather frustrating results. Manual focussing is done in a "fly-by-wire" fashion, which means the focus ring is not mechanically linked - you don't set the focus yourself, instead, you give impulses for the micromotors to move the lens elements, which is a slow process. Worse still, you cannot really see in the viewfinder if the focus is on the subject, since the S602 Zoom employs an EVF instead of a true optical through-the-lens viewfinder (such as the ones used in the aforementioned HP Photosmart c912 or the Olympus 2500L). The camera won't even display the current subject distance. Bottom line: the auto focus system works reliably if enough light is present, but not in low light conditions. Manual focussing is an option, but it is almost useless because of the way it is implemented.

Image Quality
Colour rendition is very-very good. Colours are vivid, something I like but some of you might prefer slightly more "neutral" tones. Bear in mind though that it causes much less disruption in image quality to desaturate too vivid colours a little than to saturate flat ones. Thus I really stand by Fujifilm in their choice. Skin tones are excellent, so this camera might well be called ideal for non-professional portrait photography. Resolution is something that ought to be mentioned here too, especially because most digicam users confuse it with pixel count, which is a mistake. Sensors with the same number of photosites can actually resolve very different amounts of detail! The S602 Zoom's 3-megapixel Super-CCD resolves about as much detail as a conventional 4-megapixel array, so its resolution is very good for a 3-megapixel camera. In fact, the combination of the 3rd generation Super-CCD and the razor-sharp Super-EBC Fujinon lens results in such an astonishing amount of detail that if you take a close-up portrait of your girlfriend and show it to her 1:1 on screen, chances are she'll hate the camera for capturing those little imperfections of her skin that nobody ever notices in real life! A well-focussed image with no camera shake will print beautifully in 18x24cm size, and you could even give A4 a try. There are three in-camera sharpness settings: Normal, Hard and Soft. The Hard option is useless because it produces appallingly over-sharpened photographs. Even in Normal mode, which you will want to use most of the time, you will sometimes find annoying "jaggies" and aliasing in your pictures. For your most important shots, the way to go is choosing the Soft sharpening setting and sharpen the image selectively and intelligently in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or whatever photograph editing software you prefer to use. However, this is an awkward procedure and you will not want to do this with every single shot you take, so your default sharpness setting should be Normal. Image noise is interesting with the S602 Zoom. The lowest sensitivity setting is ISO 160, which means that the COMPLETELY noise-free ISO 25 or ISO 50 setting is absent, and you will notice some image noise even at ISO 160 (this could be less pronounced if you use Soft sharpness). On the other hand, noise does not grow as steeply with higher sensitivity settings as it does with many other digicams. Also, Fujifilm have devised a clever tradeoff between image size and noise at high ISOs: you can only shoot at 1 megapixel at ISO 800 and 1600, but noise levels remain quite subtle (at least at ISO 800).

Flash Photography
This is one of the great strengths of the S602 Zoom! As opposed to most other cameras, where you can only synchronise the flash with rather slow shutter speeds such as 1/60 or 1/125 of a second, with this camera you can synchronise it with shutter speeds as fast as 1/1,000 sec - or even less, if you are willing to sacrifice some of your flash range. Now this doesn't make a difference when you use the flash in ultra low light circumstances, but if you want to freeze motion when there is some ambient light present, this is a GREAT tool! Note that using the built-in flash usually produces under-exposed photographs, so consider a flash exposure compensation of +1/3 or +2/3 EV (may God bless Fujifilm for including this feature). The camera also has a standard hotshoe for external flash units. There is no sync cable socket but for something like $10 you can buy a hotshoe-to-cable adapter, and this can open up great opportunities for you in the field of flash photography!

Macro Modes
Why plural? Because the S602 Zoom has two! One is a standard macro mode with 10-60cm subject distance range, low geometric distortion and a moderately limited zoom range, in which you can use the built-in flash (although the lens hood might cast a shadow on a part of the subject if it is really close - so you might want to use an external slave flash unit); and a Super Macro Mode, with the lens fixed at wide angle (meaning horrible barrel distortion) and no way to use the built-in flash. In Super Macro Mode you can get as close as 1cm to your subject.

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 600
This Camera is a Good Choice if You Want Something... Flexible Enough for Enthusiasts