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Of these four cameras, Fujifilm's little Z33 WP is the only one that really qualifies and an ultra-compact, measuring just 92 x 59.6 x 20.6mm and weighing a feather-light 130g including battery and card. It has a big specification though, with a 10-megapixel 1/2.33-inch CCD sensor, a 3x zoom f/3.7 lens and a big 2.7-inch 230k monitor. It's designed to be fun to use, and to survive an adventurous lifestyle. It has a strong all-metal body available in a range of bright metallic colours or the obligatory black. It can survive underwater to a depth of 3m, which may not sound impressive compared to the other deep-divers in this test, but then the Z33 is around half the price of its rivals, currently selling for around £150.

The design is very simple, with the front bearing a corner mounted lens under a glass cover and a small built-in flash, while the back has a narrow panel of rubber-covered buttons on the right of the monitor. The buttons are rather small, and their flat profile makes it difficult to operate them by touch, and virtually impossible to use while wearing gloves. The zoom control is especially fiddly. The monitor is also covered by a scratch-resistant plastic screen, and the slight air gap between this and the surface of the screen does means that when shooting underwater, even a slight angle produces a mirror-like reflection that renders the screen invisible. In daylight too the monitor is less than ideal, since it is too dim and reflective to be easily visible.


The Z33 is a very basic camera, but it does have some clever features. It has the now-obligatory scene-recognition auto mode, which works well, along with face detection, a good selection of scene modes, and a couple of automatic self-timer options. The camera is extremely easy to use, but is a bit limited for anything other than simple snapshots. It does have a movie mode with a dedicated button for quick access even when underwater, shooting at 640 x 480 resolution and 30fps with mono audio.

As one might expect from a budget-priced model the overall performance is a bit slow, with a shot-to-shot time of around 3.5 seconds, and the same in continuous shooting mode. The AF system is reasonably fast, but slows down a lot in low light.

The Fuji falls down a bit on image quality. Surprisingly for a Fujifilm camera colour reproduction is a little under-saturated and the lens is a little soft, although it's not bad for the price. Image noise is a more serious problem, visible right across the image as low as 200 ISO and getting progressively worse up to the maximum of 1600, although colour reproduction remains reasonably consistent even at the highest setting.

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