If you're tired of taking dark, underexposed, and otherwise lousy pictures of your family and friends, the latest crop of cameras with facial-recognition technology should be able to help you out. Fujifilm says that its 6.3-megapixel FinePix F31fd ($350) with "Face Detection" can recognize human faces even in low light, focus on them, and then optimize exposure. To test this feature, we took portraits of our coworkers; in cases where the camera's portrait scene mode alone left their faces underexposed, turning on Face Detection produced a brighter--and better--result. Particularly in backlit environments, Face Detection also helped with overall exposure. In a shot with multiple faces, the F31fd prioritized its focus on the closest face (but it detected others as well). In one instance, it had trouble recognizing a head that was tilted.
Fujifilm says that its 8.3-megapixel FinePix F40fd ($300), due for release in March, will also be able to crop portraits of people automatically and print (using DPOF direct-to-printer technology) as many copies of the image as there are faces in the frame. Samsung is putting its similar Intelligent Face Recognition Technology into its upcoming L73, expected in the first half of 2007.