This tough camera is freezeproof, completely waterproof, and can handle 6-foot drops
(by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer and Carol Cotton)

Rugged cameras have come a very long way since the first toughened-up models appeared a few years ago. Anyone wanting to know just how far they've come need only look at Fujifilm's new FinePix XP200, introduced March 22, 2013. The progress since those early days is almost unbelievable, both in terms of ruggedness and in terms of features and technology.

What happened, in essence, is that over a period of six years or so, "tough" cameras went from being a small niche market covered by two or three camera manufacturers to being a rather lucrative business appealing to a modern outdoor lifestyle, and also to those who need a rugged high-quality dedicated camera on the job. At a time where compact cameras are increasingly replaced by smartphones, the burgeoning segment of tough cameras is offering something those sleek, slender smartphones can't: survive the great outdoors (and work in the field) where it gets wet and cold and things get dropped and bopped around. Smartphones can't handle that. Cameras like this new Fuji FinePix XP200 can. And impressively so.

But what makes this camera so special, apart from its good looks? The way it holds up to extreme environmental conditions. For example, even amongst ultra-rugged handhelds and tablets there are few that can, regardless of cost, survive drops from more than four or five feet. The XP200 camera can survive drops from two meters (6.6 feet). That's impressive.

Equally impressive is the camera's ability to function in a wide operating temperature range from 14 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it's freezeproof. And we're actually pretty sure you can use this Fuji at temperatures much higher than 104 degrees (we frequently get more here in Sacramento, California).

But the environmental spec that's even more impressive is that the XP200 is waterproof down to 50 feet. The full significance of this class-leading depth rating may not be obvious (or meaningful) to anyone but scuba or commercial divers. For them, it means that you can actually take this camera on many "real" dives, as opposed to the shallow-only dives that cameras with 33-foot depth rating can handle. For non-divers, the difference between 33 and 50 feet is academic. The bottomline here is that this camera is IP68 rated, meaning it is absolutely and totally dustproof and waterproof. If it falls into a puddle, no problem. Even if it's left in the puddle overnight.

But there's more, and I am framing this in the sense of how very far we've come with cameras like the FinePix XP200, and less about how it compares to contemporary competition. During the early years of digital cameras, there was this quest for ever higher resolution, quickly obsoleting everything that didn't measure up. That era is gone, and as long as it's enough, the number megapixel has become almost irrelevant. The FinePix XP200 has 16.4 megapixel, which is four more than my brand-new go-to compact, a Canon G15. What matters more is that most digital cameras, including the XP200, have now switched from CCDs (charge coupled devices) to CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) imagers. I won't go into the technical details other than to say that CMOS is more flexible in making possible onboard video, imaging tricks, buffering and, one might say, treat the imager as sort of a scratch pad where different things can be done in different places rather than using the entire imager area for just images and nothing else.

As a result, the XP200 can not only take 16-megapixel stills, but also record full 1080p high defintion video, and at a blistering 60 frames per second. It can even record at 240 frames per second at lower resolutions for slow motion playback. And, again thanks to CMOS, it can shoot up to nine full resolution frames in burst mode (it even has a special button for that). Imagine how nice it is to select the best from nine full-res shots when something happens, rather than hoping that the one shot came out well. So you have a conventional shutter, a dedicated burst-mode button, and a dedicated movie button. Talk about versatility.

Now what about design and ergonomics? We haven't had hands-on yet, but from the looks of it, Fuji really thought this one through. The hardware controls are large enough, in the right place, and they are about as standard as it gets these days. The learning curve should be minimal. The display measures 3.0 inches diagonally and offers high 920k pixel resolution as well as anti-reflective coating. All that said, note that the FinePix XP200 is a fairly large camera, certainly larger than you'd think judging by the pictures on this page. A footprint of 4.6 x 2.8 inches, 1.2 inches thickness, and half a pound is considerably more substantial than a slender little pocket camera. In fact, it's almost as large as my compact Canon G15.

A good optical zoom is always appreciated, and a 5X optical zoom is better than the 3X lens magnification that's usually standard on basic cameras, and a whole lot better than no optical zoom at all, as is the case with cameras integrated into smartphones and mobile computers. And this being a rugged camera, the zoom is completely internal, without a fragile lens barrel moving in an out. Also nice is that the zoom starts slightly wide at 28mm equivalent, which means you get more into a frame. There's also a 2X digital zoom multiplier, but this is "intelligent" digital zoom without the reduction of image quality of conventional digital zoom that simply enlarge each recorded pixel. In macro mode you can get as close as 3.5 inches. Good enough.

And there are some neat tricks. There's a wireless image transfer feature that lets you copy pictures and movies to smartphones and computers. There's also remote camera browsing so you can peruse your pictures on the much larger screen of a tablet. About the only thing I'm not crazy about is the measly 40MB of internal memory In an era where every phone has at least 8GB of storage, a camera ought to have than just a few meg. Why? Because sometimes you forget to put a card in, or the card gets full, or it goes bad. That's when you need internal storage.

Bottom line