Photokina 2010 was the launching pad for a relatively new class of point-and-shoot, and Fujifilm’s FinePix X100 was just one of the many high-end, zoomless compacts designed to put DSLR-level image quality into your right (or left, for southpaws) rear pocket. Of course, the compromise is the inability to swap lenses and the omission of an optical zoom, but evidently the market research has shown that there’s a market for this thing, yet. The X100 oozes beauty, but it most definitely comes at a cost — over ,000 at last check. For those with plenty of disposable income and a hankering for anything new, we’re as curious as can be to hear how your experience with this guy has been. Have you been overly impressed with the design? Would you have tweaked the lens at all? Thrown together a less rigid chassis for the sake of weight / cost? Added an option for an interchangeable lens mount? Go on and get creative in comments below — you’ve earned it.

How would you change Fujifilm’s FinePix X100? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jun 2011 23:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Europeans already know this. The Fiesta is very popular across the pond, earning the title of Europe’s top selling car in 2009. It has won award after award and now it’s finally available here in the states, the final piece in Ford’s most impressive car lineup ever.

Make it fun and the sales will come

The 2011 Ford Fiesta’s secret is the astoundingly good 6-speed PowerShift automatic transmission. Not only does it contribute heavily to the class-leading 40 mpg highway rating, but it’s a real workhorse providing a silky-smooth ride. We found that hills and city driving were a non-issue thanks to the lovely affair of the PowerShift transmission mated to the peppy 120 horsepower 1.6-liter DOHC I-4 engine while the super–ridged chassis and European-tuned suspension handled curves with ease.

These four key characteristics combine to make a truly fun ride. The tight suspension and quick-shifting tranny allows for aggressive driving, a rare trait in this class. Think of the 2011 Fiesta as a compact that’s as fun as the Mazda MX-5 but with room for two car seats and a stroller.

There really isn’t anything like it in its class – driving-ability or equipment-wise. The $13,995 base trim level four-door Fiesta is better equipped than other compacts with a AM/FM radio, power windows, blind spot mirrors, rear-defogger and 5 speed manual transmission, with the five-door option fetching a bit more with a starting price of $15,795.. The well-equipped and modern interior looks like something from a car that should cost thousands more, especially when compared directly against the stale interiors of the Toyota Yaris or Honda Fit.

The Fiesta wins handily in the equipment list, too. A person can equip their Fiesta with nearly any automotive option imaginable including keyless entry, push button start, LED parking lamps, ambient interior lighting, and heated mirrors. In fact, shoppers will probably be surprised that many items are standard like the four-inch LCD info screen and capless fuel filer.

Expect to see many variations of the Fiesta driving around. The vehicle is available in nine vibrant exterior colors with vinyl graphic packs available from Ford dealers. The aftermarket industry will likely grab hold of the car as well, offering countless mods and body kits to the tuner crowd – not that the car needs any help in the style department.

Sync wins again

It’s hard to believe that Ford’s peers have yet to come up with a system that compares to Sync. This system alone is a valid reason to buy the 2011 Ford Fiesta over other compacts. It’s that good and offers so much functionality and safety. The best part is that Ford is continually developing and improving the system and regularly rolls out new features.

Sync starts out as an option in the mid-level SE model and offers a little bit for nearly everyone. Music and gadget lovers will love the ability to control and queue up music from their iPods with only their voice. There’s even a new feature rolling out shortly that will bring the same function to BlackBerry and Android apps such as Pandora, OpenBeak, and Stitcher.

The system also compensates for the Fiesta’s lack of navigation by offering turn-by-turn directions served up from a Bluetooth-connected cell phone – no data plan required. The center-mounted heads-up display even assists the computer-read directions with directional arrows, a welcomed-feature that nearly replicates the experience provided by a true GPS unit.

Everyone, look at Ford

Never before has Ford’s car offering been so strong and the compact Fiesta is a big part of that. In fact, it might be the jewel of the lineup with its low-admission cost to a truly well equipped ride. It isn’t alone with a redesigned Focus coming soon, the Fusion that earned Car of the Year from Motor Trend, and the industry-busting big-daddy Taurus. Simply put, if you’re looking for a new car, you must test drive a Ford.

And, well, because the Internet allows me this type of freedom, I present to you Top Gear’s much more entertaining take on the Euro-spec Fiesta. Enjoy. It’s one of the show’s best-ever segments and make sure you watch part one and two. I like the second one the best.

The Canon PowerShot G series have always been one of the best compact shooters available. See that pic above? I shot that back in 2003 with a G3. Beautiful, isn’t? That’s Camp Tapico in Northern Michigan, where I spent every summer of my teenage life. Anyway, word on the street is that Nikon wants some of the action that the G series has enjoyed all by itself for so long. Better late then never, Nikon.

Actually it’s probably a great time for Nikon to out a G rival. The Micro Four Third format isn’t taking off and Sony is developing a rival, which will help no one. Plus a good amount of amateur photographers were born over the last few years as DSLRs dropped in price. Those same folks are probably satisfied with their new cams, but long for something a bit smaller that offers a lot of the same quality and features. That’s where the G series has always thrived and Nikon could stop its loyal customers from defecting to the Canon camp with a cam of their own.

Nikon’s UK senior product manager Kevin Egan recently raved about the G11 in Amateur Photographer, calling it a benchmark for high-end prosumer compacts and that Nikon has something similar in the works. This compact will borrow technology from Nikon’s DSLR line, but be built like a high-end Coolpix camera.

Combine a high ISO sensor with good low-light capabilities with a fast lens and Nikon will have a winner on its hands. That’s all we need. It doesn’t have to have an HD video mode, face detection, or any of that consumer nonsense. Nikon-loyal prosumers just want a smaller camera to tout around town when it’s inconvenient to bring the DSLR.

One of the best personalized gifts for the groom’s men is a customized flask. At www.flaskshop.com, you can find wedding favor ideas starting as low as $22. There are tan, black leather, stainless steel, brown leather and faux crocodile flasks available. Most flasks come with monogrammed letters and small funnels. For $40, you can even insert a photograph into the flask! At www.eflasks.com, there are unique wedding favor gift sets that include a shot glass, funnel and flask for $21.95 (or 5/$100). At www.myweddingreceptionideas.com, you can find camouflage flasks ($22.50), rounded flasks ($23.25), plaid/leather flasks ($24.75), multi-colored flasks ($19.50) and vintage stainless steel flasks ($18).

For bridesmaids, useful personalized favors may include a mirrored compact. For $24.95, you can get personalized, silver-plated, purse-shaped compact mirrors at www.perfectwedding.com. There is a large selection of personalized mirrored compacts at www.enchantedlantern.com for $30, that include pictures of cherubs, vintage beach wedding favors, western themes, Rosie the Riveter, Chat Noir and more. Over at the unique independent merchant site, www.etsy.com, you can choose a monogrammed lighted compact for just $12 — that is, if you don’t fall in love with any of their other one-of-a-kind unique wedding favor designs first!

Personalized favors are fit for wedding reception party favor gifts too. At www.favorfavor.com, you can order personalized compact mirrors for all your female guests for just 99 cents. Personalized mini candy jars sell for just 85 cents and are the perfect addition to your guests’ work desks. For the drinking family, you can choose personalized shot glasses for 75 cents, personalized photo coasters for $1.15, engraved wine glasses for $2.19, custom pint glasses for $1.59 and personalized champagne flutes for $1.89. This website also offers monogrammed lip balm for $1.29, personalized coffee mugs for $1.59, personalized playing cards for $1.45, useful customized pens for $1.79, customized mint tins for 49 cents to $2.49 and various candles for under $2. There’s no limit to what you can customize these days!

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PL70 The PL70 comes with a 12.2-megapixel sensor, capturing stills and 720p HD video through a wide-angle 28mm lens with 5x optical zoom and displaying them for your pleasure on the 3-inch, 230K colour, LCD screen on the back. It measures 95.8mm × 59.5mm × 23.9mm, comes in black, silver, red or pink and gives you 11 scene modes to play with as well as an intelligent auto mode that will make the choice for you. Naturally, there’s image stabilisation, whether you’re in optical or digital zoom modes, and it comes with all the usual beauty shot, smile shot, face detection, blink detection and self portrait modes that most good compacts have these days to help you get the results you’re after. A very reasonable £199 from August. PL55 Essentially the same beast as its bigger brother here but no HD video shooting mode. You can still capture moving footage but only in 640 x 480 MPEGS rather than the H.264 encoding on the PL70.

That brings the price down to £149 but you also switch to a standard, non-wide, 35mm lens and a smaller 2.7-inch LCD and I’m not sure that’s worth the saving. However, if you are on a budget, you can pick up this 97mm x 59mm x 24.5mm model in either black, silver, red or blue from next month. ES17

The baby of today’s three is the £89 Samsung ES17. Just face detection and beauty shot to play with but a reasonable enough 12.2-megapixel sensor and 3x optical zoom. There’s still image stabilisation, not that you’ll really need it at that magnification, and although you’ll get more functionality on a cameraphone these days, they ES17 will probably still give you a better picture. You get what you pay for. Samsung

Er, wow. That’s quite a leak. More of a gush, a flood, a deluge of camera goodies. I feel a bit sorry for Nikon but, you never know, it might work in their favour. What seems to have happened is that someone’s got hold of a 37-page document from Nikon HQ in Kingston, UK, and decided to talk about it in one foreign language or another before Nikon Rumours banged it back through a Google translator and came out with some interesting garblings that looked like this. I’ll spare you heavy lens details here on TD but do take a look at the original for details. The headlines on the cameras, though, are as follows: End of July 2009 We’re going to see a Coolpix range of compacts, including a model with a 10 lumens, LED projector capable of 40″ images at a 640×480 resolution. 4th August 2009 Launch of the Nikon D3000 and Nikon D300s – specced down version of the D5000 and the long awaited upgrade of the fabulous D300. The D300s looks like it’ll have Full HD video shooting at 24fps, improved AF, self timer + mirror-up and an SD card slot to go along with the compact flash. 15th October Launch of the upgrade of the Nikon D700, the Nikon D700x. It’ll come with a with a 24.5-megapixel sensor, Full HD video at 24 fps, improved AF and self timer + mirror-up. Q2 2010 Launch of what we all thought we’d see when the D5000 came out – the Nikon D400 – and the Nikon D4 for the serious among us. The D400 will have a 13.8-megapixel sensor and Full HD video at 24fps. Switch the numbers for 15.7 and 30 for the D4. Q3 2010 The launch of the impressive sounding Nikon Coolpix P1DX which’ll come with a with DX 12.3-megapixel stabilised sensor, 28-85mm/3.5-5.6f zoom and a 2.9-inch 920k LCD. Q4 2010 And just in case you’ve got any money left or you fancy getting a third mortgage just for shits and giggles, then you’ll be able to prepare for the 30.2-megapixel Nikon D4x which probably has the kind of features to keep you interested until the next roadmap comes out. Naturally, this could all be a load of nonsense. I’ll let you know on 4th August. (via Nikon Rumours)

The new Sony Cybershot DSC-W290 was released this week. The Carl Zeiss lens wielding compact, packs a punchy 12.1 megapixels and a boat-load of software features all for around £240. In black or blue and weighing in at 160g, the W290 isn’t going to be strain in your pocket but does come with all the features of an altogether more expensive compact.Boasting multi-face detection, anti-blink reduction, smile shutter and red eye reduction, the W290 has a feature set not to be sniffed at. Though whether this means it will be any good at taking pictures is another thing entirely. Too often the practise with compacts seems just to wedge them full of megapixels, vaguely helpful and occasionally, entirely useless features with the quality of the snaps playing second fiddle. Megapixels do not maketh a compact. A lens does though. The thing that should set the W290 apart is Dynamic Range Optimization, which works by automatically figuring out the best exposure and contrast levels to give more natural looking photos. Sounds like the same old shtick you’ve heard a bajillion times before? Me too. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on one soonish and find out. If you’ve got a W290 tell us what you think about it in the comments, go on. Do it. I freaking dare you. What are you scared? You chicken…Go on.

Tiny little HD camcorders are two a penny this year and today is the turn of Panasonic’s two with there being around 50,000 pennies in this case. The HDC-SD10 and HDC-TM10 are a pocket sized 227g, shoot at 1080p resolution and give you a very nice 16x optical zoom to play with. The only difference between the two is that the SD10 allows you to record to SD/SDHC cards only whereas the TM10 gives you an 8GB HDD on top of that. No word on the stills ability of these palm-sized pieces with just a 1/6″ MOS sensor and a measly sounding 1.17-megapixel resolution but they do have scene modes plus an intelligent auto function (iA), so expect the same kind of usability you’d find in the Lumix compacts. AF/AE tracking will keep your subjects well lit and in focus and there’s also the kind of face detection and face tracking modes you’d look for in all good camcorders these days. Perhaps one of the nicest treats, though, is the pre-record feature which will give you the three seconds of footage that happened prior to you getting your finger on the shoot button. It’s all done through the use of the camcorders’ buffer memory. It’s not a lot but then, three seconds should be enough for pretty much even the slowest of wit. Shame it doesn’t help if you’ve got the lens pointed in the wrong direction. Both models are out in June with the SD10 at £499.99 and the HDC-TM10 for £529. Panasonic

Sony has launched three entry level DSLR cameras today in the their alpha range. This gives me the opportunity to geek out over some tech I love and find out what the html for &alpha is. The baby of the bunch is the &alpha280 which comes with a 10.2-megapixel CCD sensor, 2.7-inch fixed LCD and weighs 450g. The &alpha330 is a touch heftier at 490g, it has the same sensor but the bonus here is that you get a tilt LCD. Last up is the &aplha380 which is identical to the &alpha330 except it’s got 14.2 megapixels of resolution power and it’s possibly not worth spending the extra on. Those specs aside, you’re essentially looking at the same beast whichever you splash out on. They all use the BIONZ processor for all the CPU power, they each offer ISOs up to 3200 and they’ll let you fire off at 2.5fps. The Minolta and Konica Minolta lens compatibility ensures you’re getting some quality at the business end of the camera but I feel a little cheated they haven’t stepped up to the plate with CMOS sensors. Feels like they’ve kept the best bit from consumers despite the step up you may have made. There’s some decent tech in the shape of the in-body image stabilisation and the improved quick AF in live view mode, and there’s probably just the right amount of options to play with in terms of white balance, exposure and light metering.

Prices and dates when we get them but rest assured that Sony isn’t going to freeze you out with their weirdo proprietary memory sticks. You can use them if you want but all three cameras come with SD/SDHC compatibility too. And, once you’ve had it with the kit lens and you want a little more for your burgeoning shutter addiction, Sony is also releasing a bunch of lenses.

The DT-50 (F1.8) is a fixed 50mm piece of glass for portraits; if you want to get nice and wide there’s the DT18-55mm (F3.5-5.6); you can go long with the DT 55-200mm (F4-5.6) and there’s also a 1:1 macro lens, the DT 30mm F2.8, for extreme close-up photography. Enjoy yourself. Sony