TinysMom wrote:
Found the basic manual - its called "Macro" mode?
Macro is usually just a fancy way of saying "close focus". In point-and-shoots that typically means that the camera focuses on a closer subject than it normally would.
In the DSLR world, "macro" is marketing-speak for "this lens focuses closer than three feet or thereabouts". A true macro lens (which are fairly rare and very expensive) will make an image on the film/sensor which is at least half the size it is in real life. Like this picture, taken with a Nikon 105mm macro:
Fuji makes a good camera - I've had several of their DSLR's (which are Nikon cameras with Fuji electronics). In fact, the picture above was taken with a Finepix S2 Pro. I now have a Nikon D300, but I kept the Fuji S3 body, too.
The pictures you're getting are good (I would use a photo editor like Photoshop Elements to bring up the whites to pure white, and make the blacks blacker), but as good as they are, I think if you tried a DSLR you'd never look back. The Nikon D40 is not hugely expensive with the basic "kit" lens, and the image quality is miles beyond any point-and-shoot. The reason's actually fairly simple - all point-and-shoots use very small sensors to keep the size of the camera small. For the same number of pixels, a larger sensor will take sharper pictures, because the tiny pixel sites in the small sensors tend to bleed over into each other.
