Long gone are the days when a camera was a large, square, bulky, nondescript piece of heavy metal that you hauled out for family reunions and company portraits; and three cheers for that, say all of us. Fujifilm has for some time recognised that cameras should be fun, lightweight and perfectly adapted to your lifestyle and the Z33WP is a classic example of a cheeky compact for the adventure generation.

For a start, it's available in a range of daringly bright colours, fittingly labelled as Kiwi Green, Hawaiian Blue, Daredevil Black, Liquid Gold and Rock Chick Pink. Although it is comparatively small (92 x 60 x 21mm), the 2.7-inch LCD monitor at the back looks bigger than it is because it takes up almost all of the available space. The reason for this is the Z33WP's biggest selling point: it's waterproof to a depth of 3 metres, hence the control buttons have been completely reconfigured.

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Instead of the usual mode dial, D-pad and separately assigned buttons for things like macro, flash and delete, you now have a neat double row of identical, raised, rubberized buttons that handle all the functions, including zoom and navigation. To maximize protection from water, the USB output has been relocated inside the battery compartment in the base, together with the SD card holder (a welcome change from Fujifilm's usual xD-Picture card-only policy).

As this is still essentially a relatively basic point-‘n'-shoot camera, you only have a 3x optical zoom, and a very noisy and slow-acting one it is too. This sloth extends to playback, when it takes forever to zoom full in on a frame (as does scrolling through images). Peculiarly for a camera that is billed as one for the extreme crowd, there's no form of decent lens protection and, despite its admirable waterproofing, it's just as vulnerable to shock treatment and extremes of weather as its rivals in this category.

At least you do have a fascinating range of shooting modes including Museum, Party, Auction (which shoots and combines four frames in VGA size for blogging, eBay or social networks) and Scene Recognition Auto, which chooses the appropriate settings from six of the presets. Other novel touches include Successive Movie (which stitches your mini-movies together) and the Group self-timer mode where you select the number of faces you want in the frame and the camera takes the picture only when all the faces are in place.

The quality of the images is generally sharp, authentic and vivid, as you'd expect from a 10-megapixel camera, without being especially outstanding, which is what you'd expect from an extremely affordable compact digital. In short, if you want something inherently cool and perfect for a beach holiday in particular, then this would be an ideal camera to slip into your bathing shorts.

Ideally targeted at the youth crowd who love to party, scuba dive and join the adventure trail, this impressively cheap underwater camera is chic and easy to use but does have disappointing zoom and playback operations.