I have used three digital cameras; my first one was an extremely cheap Aptek pen camera, the second a Nikon Coolpix 775 and the Fuji Finepix S5000.

The Aptek was a £45 gamble; it ate batteries, the image was very poor but it was fun and my children still have fun with it, but that was enough to say "Yes I like this digital photography and I want more!"

The Nikon was a birthday present. It is a 3M pixel compact camera with a 3x zoom lens. This camera rekindled my interest in photography which leads me onto the Fuji.

The Fuji was another present; my employer gave me a wad of John Lewis vouchers for my 20 year long service award so for a little under £350 I was the proud owner of a Fuji S5000 camera.

I have to say that I could have bought the camera for a lot less elsewhere, in fact if I had been able to trade the vouchers I would have bought a Minolta Z1 Dimage camera. John Lewis "Never knowing undersold" yes but the fine print excludes deals done on the internet, there is always a catch. I was not too happy with the customer service in the Edinburgh store, without putting a fine point on it I had to make an appointment to see a shop assistant - no kidding.

I have used the Fuji for around six months and have come to the realisation that if it is excellence in a camera that you want then this camera is crap. It is fine for taking pictures where quality does not really count but where you need that fine edge of detail then the fuji does not cut any mustard.

Digital cameras have three elements; the lens, the CCD (the thing that converts light to digital) and the storage. The lens on the Fuji features a 10x zoom a great plus, the CCD boasts 6M pixel resolution, then in fact it is 3 M pixel with some clever technology and this is important it is very noisy. The last element is the storage, in this case a Fuji XD card, which are expensive and not so popular and to get the digital image onto the memory card the image is heavily compressed leading to a loss of picture quality.

As I have discovered digital noise is the all important factor here. Digital pictures are made up of little dots of colour or pixels, noise forces itself onto the pixels and degrades the picture quality. It should be totally unnecessary for anyone to need to use a program like NeatImage to reduce the effects of camera noise but it is a vital element in my tool kit for making half decent image.

In saying all that I am a very amateur photographer, I enjoy photographing aircraft just as much now as I ever did. The Fuji is certainly good enough for this web site but not very much use for anything that requires a refined image.

So all said and done, I am going to use my thirty year old Canon AE-1P film camera a whole lot more for the pictures that count.

I have now bought a Canon 300 digital camera with a nice sexy 300 mm lens and have seen a major improvement in the quality of my photographs. You will now be able to see the difference in colour and image quality. I have since started to have my photographs accepted for Airliners.net and Jetphotos.net, which have much, much higher standards than I normally aspire to.