One of the main reasons I purchased this camera was because of it's small size, I liked the idea of being able to carry it about in my pocket rather than lugging a camera bag around with me, the thought of being able to get my hands on my camera as soon as that "picture moment" presented itself appealed to me.

Carrying accessories around is no great hardship either, a couple of spare AAA rechargeable batteries and a couple of spare xD cards take up no pocket space at all.
Even if you are going to need a tripod to eliminate camera shake on low speed settings this is not a problem as there are a lot of good mini tripods on the market and as this camera is so small they keep it quite steady.

I must admit I was a bit taken in with this Super CCD technology statement. It claims to produce an output from this 3.1 million pixel camera equivalent to 6 million pixels. To be honest I cannot see any noticeable difference between the two settings so you may as well set it to 3M giving you room for twice as many pictures on the memory card.

Another feature I like to have on a camera is a close up mode, the Fujifilm F420 has got an adequate close up mode but it is very difficult to get an auto focus lock and there is no manual focus. The main cause of the auto focus failure is either not enough differential between colours, lack of light or the lens to close to the subject. What I have had to resort to doing is to focus on something at the same distance as the required image, hold the shutter button at its first stage, then move to frame the required subject material, this has been a bit hit and miss but most of the resulting images have been OK.

The camera struggles to auto focus in low light conditions as well, although the flash illuminates the subject when it is in range sometimes the range cannot be determined. I have found that ignoring the A/F warning and taking the pictures anyway when using the flash that the subject has been in focus most of the time so it must have a "best guess" setting built in.

If using the camera in slow sync mode I recommend the use of a tripod, monopod, bean bag or any of the many of the camera steadying devices available as I can guarantee camera shake nine times out of ten if some sort of device is not used.