Cute, fast, but movie mode not impressive

I've been a fan of Fujifilm for some time, having owned the F10 and the F20, and now the Z5. So my experience with the Z5 is definitely impacted by my previous ownership of "family members".

First things first: if you are looking for sublime photo quality at 8x10 print sizes, don't even pause here. The Z5 uses what's called a folded lens, meaning one that is completely contained inside the body and has no external moving parts. These lenses, while they have the advantage of allowing for very compact and non-protruding lens assemblies, cannot measure up to a really good, normally extending zoom lens. This holds true for the Z series AND the Sony T series AND the Olympus folding lens series. Good, but they could all be better.

Is that important? Depends on you. This camera is clearly will marketed toward younger people who have a utilitarian view as cameras as being gadgets that help them chronicle their lives. If you fall into that category, you'll most likely be pleased with the camera.

The pluses:
1) It focuses fast, and surprisingly well in dim light considering it has no AF assist beam
2) Appealing exterior, fast startup once the "clamshell" cover is opened.
3) Excellent flash recycling, quite unlike, say, the Canon 710IS where you have time for the proverbial shave and a haircut between flashes.
4) Durable, as I found out when I mistakenly dropped mine from a height that only the Olympus SW models are designed to withstand.
5) An absolutely stunning LCD. It is bright, gorgeous, and ultrasharp. Every other camera should have one like this. Very cool for sharing pictures.
6)Very easy to handhold, lots of space for thumb of right hand to rest on back without accidentally touching any setting buttons.
7) Very good low light pictures. A small step backward from the F10,20,30 models in terms of low light capability, but still way better than any competing camera with the same price/feature set. Shoots good pictures at ISO 800. Try that with the much more pricey Canon SD series, and your pictures will look like (bad) paintings by some impressionist master.

The minuses:
1) Plastic tripod mount on metal body? C'mon!
2) STILL no standard out-of-camera battery charger. So there's effectively no way to charge a spare battery if you're like me and want one with you just in case, other than getting up at 2 AM to replace batteries inside the camera body for charging. A major Fuji weakness and it's wearing thin on me. BUT, the battery life is pretty good, more than enough for a day's shooting unless you have a lead finger like I do.
3) Uses xD cards, which seem headed the same way as the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths before them.
4) Deleting pictures is S L O W. You can't select a batch of them to delete as you can, again, on the Olympus SW and many other camera models. You have to delete them one by one, and between every deletion, there is a 1 to 2 second blue screen animation. This I don't understand for the life of me. There is no surer way to annoy a camera owner than making them wait to delete pictures they don't even want anymore.
5) Movie mode nothing to write home about. Perfectly well suited for you-tube ( comes with such a mode, in fact ); but not if you're an indoor family chronicler depending on at least some basic level of quality. I did a comparo between movie modes of the Oly SW 720, Canon 710 IS, and this - and this one was by far the worst, exhibiting the greatest amount of chroma abberations under artificial lighting. In daylight, much better, but still far worse than the Canon.
6) Face detection? Yes, but only if the person actually faces DIRECTLY toward the camera. Any hint of obliquity (?), and you can forget FD.
7) IR mode did not work for me, it failed to communicate with my supposedly compatible IRDA-equipped Canon printer.

My bottom line: know exactly what you want before you buy this. If you're looking for a small, stylish and solid, long life battery, fast, quick flash recharge and above average image quality camera at low light settings, this is it. It's small enough to be taken pretty much anywhere, and fast enough to capture pretty much anything in good and not-so-good conditions.

If you're into good movie modes, routinely blow up your pictures to poster size, end up deleting a lot of images in-camera, are unhappy with only having one battery at a time, and hate dragging around an adapter cable thingamajig to plug the camera into, then this camera will frustrate you. There seems little point in producing an ultra compact camera, especially when you're making some concessions in lens quality, and then forcing people to lug around an admittedly lightweight but still incredibly bulky two-cords-and-one-adapter setup.