Working at Crutchfield has its perks. For example, I recently went to New York City and was able to borrow a brand new digital camera, the Fuji FinePixF200EXR. I would normally have taken my own camera, but I'm pretty hard on them and at the moment, I'm between cameras. So, the offer to take the Fuji, and write a review afterwards was pretty sweet.

I'll tell you a little about my trip first. My dad, my cousin, and I drove to NYC and rode our bikes around the city, to see the sights. My cousin has a girlfriend who lives in the West Village, and we used her apartment as our home base. From there we rode over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, thru the financial district and Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. We rode all the way from one end of Central Park to the other, and up to 125th Street where we saw the Apollo Theater. We hung out in Times Square, went up in the Empire State Building and Thirty Rock. We tried to see as much of New York as you can in three days, and bikes made it easy. The craziest thing we did was ride our bikes like those nutty couriers, in traffic, dodging buses, taxicabs, and a lot of pedestrians.

I had the Fuji in my pocket for the whole trip. I took pictures from the tops of tall buildings, pics and videos in Times Square, and videos of street performers in the subway stations, Central Park, and on random street corners. The wildest thing I caught on video was a pretty bad accident on the set of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. They were filming a chase scene in Times square at 2:00 AM Monday morning when a stunt driver lost control of his Ferrari and ran into a pizza restaurant. I caught the whole thing on video and uploaded it to YouTube as soon as we got home.

I was impressed with this camera's overall performance, and some specific features. 12 megapixels is a lot, and it's nice to have when you take a shot looking down from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. As you can see in the photo at left, the detail of the streets below is amazing, and the color is quite remarkable. Just look at the beautiful green in the parks both near and far (click on the image to enlarge).

And in this photo on the right, from the top of Thirty Rock at night, taken in pretty low light you can again see the green park below, each window on each building, and the bright lights of Times Square shining up on the skyscrapers (click on the image to enlarge).

I should point out that I never used any of the manual settings on this camera. I didn't want to take any time to adjust settings, I just wanted to take pictures, so these shots were all taken in the automatic mode. I was very impressed with the camera’s ability to be in the right mode for the pictures I wanted to take. No red eye, no blurry pictures, vibrant colors, and plenty of sharp detail.

The included battery lasted the entire three days, and I took a lot of video and photos. I was really happy not to have any downtime with a dead battery. I was annoyed though, when I had to take time to get out my computer and unload pictures from my 2GB SD™ card. It made me realize that with ability to take pictures and video like there's no tomorrow, it's a lot more convenient to have a big SD memory card, like 8GB or more.

My dad, cousin and I agreed. This trip to New York City was something we’ll never forget, and having a ton of great pictures and video will help us remember all the details. We’ll probably go back to The Big Apple to see if it’s possible to have more fun than we had this time, and if we do, I hope to have my own Fujifilm FinePix F200EXR to record all the details.