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For battery duration Fuji claims 300 shots per charge, and I find this quite believable. I shot nearly 200 pictures with it over several days of testing and the charge indicator only lost one of its three bars. The camera is powered by a larger-than-average 1150mAh Li-ion battery, so with efficient circuitry there should be enough juice in there to last through even the busiest the weekend.

Even with its exceptional low-light performance and battery duration, it is in picture quality that the F20 really shines. Exposure and colour rendition are flawless, and the excellent Fujinon f/2.8-5.0 lens produces pin-sharp images with tons of fine detail, with virtually no barrel distortion at the wide-angle end. Fuji’s 6.3MP SuperCCD HR sensor captures more fine detail than any comparable six megapixel sensor that I can think of, and more than some seven or eight megapixel cameras. Image files average around 3MB per shot, which is about average for a 6MP camera, and means that a newly-formatted 1GB xD Picture card is good for approximately 341 shots.

The F20 has a manually-selectable ISO range of 100-1600, with up to ISO 2000 available in some scene modes, and takes usable pictures even at the highest setting. Images are noise-free at 800 ISO, and at 1600 only a little detail blurring reveals the actions of the noise control system. It’s not quite up to the 3200-ISO performance of the F31fd, but it’s the best you’ll get for the price. With the relatively fast maximum aperture of the lens it does mean you can take sharp low-light photos without the flash, even without an image stabilisation system.

Verdict
In the FinePix F20 Fujifilm have a virtually perfect social snapshot camera. Its crisp performance, exceptional low-light capabilities, powerful flash, long-lasting battery and ease of use make it ideal for parties and social occasions, and its excellent image quality means that all those embarrassing photos of your drunken friends will be sharp, detailed and colourful.

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