Snap unhappy

I had an Olympus-SP130 that I wasn't too happy with. My main sticking point was that it ran on AA batteries, and it ate them alive. I'd be lucky to get an hour out of two Duracell before the LCD would go off and it was very frustrating at times. So the day I accidentally cracked the screen I saw the chance to get a new camera and resolve all the issues I had with the Olympus. After much research I eventually settled on the FUJIFILM FinePix Z100 fd.



It seemed to be the answer. It had a proprietary battery and charger with long lifetime, it wasn't as clunky as the Olympus, it was easier to use and of course it used 900,000 more pixels. After wading through all these bells and whistles, it was much to my dismay that when I took some photos using the highest image quality setting, the quality didn't compare to that of the Olympus on a moderate settings. The images weren't as sharp. There's a lot more purple fringing, especially with low light shots and in general the pictures were slightly noisy.

Now I'm aware that one gets what one pays for, but this camera was around €250 (i.e. not dirt cheap), came from the same range as the Olympus (i.e. subcompact) and used more of the almighty megapixels. This, I believed, was how to gauge the capabilities of a camera from the outside but it appears I was wrong. Now I'm far from an expert in digital imagery and all that goes with it, but it's apparent that the marketing folk in the camera industry have decided to latch on the "megapixel" as the proponent of the camera that serves as its ultimate benchmark, when I suspect that this is not the case.

To the untrained, if Camera A from Brand A costs €350 and proclaims 8 megapixels, and Camera B from Brand B costs €335 and proclaims 7.1 megapixels then it would be forgiven of them to immediately nab Camera A. How disappointed would they be if they found out Camera B was actually better at the bread and butter?

So in my opinion I feel I've been duped. You may say it's my own fault and it probably is but I think I only fell for what the majority of casual camera buyers fall for also. I also should have known better. In areas in which I command greater expertise, for example computing, I know to look past the bullshit to what really matters when buying, say, a new graphics card. I think I attempted to employ this tactic when I bought my camera but obviously I failed miserably!

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could give me the actual low-down?