Great Value, tons of good qualities

I bought this camera for my teenage sister's birthday present. She is traveling to China this summer so my goal was to find a good quality camera that would be good for everyday teenage snapshots and be able to give her quality memories of her travels.

I chose the Fuji A340 for the following reasons:
Image Quality: 4mp and I hoped it would be clear (it is)

Size: small

Lens cover: attached, sliding cover (not all cameras have a cover!)

Features:Auto focus, portrait, action, landscape...

Memory: XD - (thats what our other cameras have too...)

USB- Yay! just plug it in and away it goes!

Batteries- only takes two!!!!
(with all digital cameras, I'd recommend rechargeable,but we've filled up the 16mb card 5 times, using the LCD screen to take and look at the pics, AND then uploading to the camera 5 times before the battery started to go low,so I think that's pretty good. Rechargeables will last longer of course, and having a bigger card (we'll have one tomorrow) will avoid the drain of uploading so many times- especially cause we forget to unplug it! =)


Tv cable- watch your pics on tv (play through the camera)
it's an awesome feature, you're able to take pictures while the camera is plugged into the tv,(great for posing family pics so everyone can see if they had thier eyes open, etc...)
We watched her pictures from China on the tv, much nicer than crowding around an album.

I hadn't been planning on using the Fuji picture program that comes with the camera, but I downloaded it on my sister's computer and played with it a bit, it really is easy to use, you can crop and change the size of your pics, add text in just seconds... the program pops up a minute after you plug your camera into the computer. oh and it was so easy to email pics from the program, you dont have to look through your files for the right pic, just click on the pic you're looking at and hit the email button.

But what you really want to know about the FujiFilm A340 is, do the pictures really look good? Yes, they do. For $217 at Walmart.com, I'm very satisfied. This camera will get her through the rest of high school and college.

Oh, I didn't even mention the zoom! Yay! There is zoom! Our mom was very definite that my sister's camera would have to have at least some zoom! (one reason we ruled out a few others in that price range) anyway, 3x optical is plenty for her, its like your average 35mm camera with zoom, I think makes it around a 128mm?

Ok, back to picture quality... that's what it's really about, right? Pictures I took outside were 100% sharp! beee-u-ti-ful! =)

But what about inside shots? We had her birthday dinner at TGIF's and it was really low lit. The A340 gave clear,focused,sharp pictures 97% of the time on auto focus!
the couple that came out blurry were because our nephew was moving too fast for auto focus. we could of switched it to action mode, it only takes a second, but we didn't really need to.

The indoor shots at our house with normal lighting came out great! I think the flash works really well, and adjusts for the situation well.
(important to note: the shutter speed is fast, (pictures are not blurry or grainy) but the camera takes longer to record to memory in low light conditions... longest we've experienced between being able to take pictures is 3-4 seconds.

I have not tried out the video mode yet, and I prob won't either... although my sis might have fun with it.
One more pro for the A340 is the docking station is OPTIONAL!!! (unlike kodak) You don't need it! (look, right there I saved you $80!)
Finally, since my sister was traveling to an area where she will not have electricity, so it's a huge plus that the camera only takes 2 batteries! We gave her a 16 pack and she didn't have to worry about finding a place to recharge or buy a voltage adapter
(update:She is back from 2 weeks in China and says she didn't have to change batteries too much~she had batteries left over, but try getting an exact count from a teenager!)

All pictures taken with A340, any distortion in picture size is from geocities website builder.

http://www.geocities.com/skygirll/pics.html
AND
http://www.geocities.com/skygirll/China.html

That should do it, hope this helps!

oh yeah, for those who skipped through the review...
I definitely recommend this camera! =)