A great advanced camera that packs a lot of features into a reasonably small package.

For this price, the Kodak C875 is a great bargain. It isn't as good as some of the high end advanced units from Canon or Olympus, but it more than does the job and offers a well rounded package that will satisfy a wide variety of users.

If you can live without optical zoom and want a classically designed camera to remind you of the good old days, then the GR Digital might be for you. It is, however, extremely expensive.

Panasonic's FZ18 is a solid ultra-zoom camera. While the price tag is high, many users would be better served spending that money on an SLR, whereas those after a huge zoom lens and a mass of features along with several beginner-friendly shooting modes may find what they're looking for here.

A strong choice if you're after an ultra zoom camera, the Cyber-Shot DSC-H9 sports a 15x optical zoom and captures some good shots, however it does have issues with haloing and purple fringing, which will be irritating for many users.

Kodak's EasyShare Z8612 IS has a few things going for it, including a large zoom that is backed up by optical image stabilisation. However, its images exhibit a fair bit of fringing and it can at times be quite slow.

Overall the Z850 is a solid advanced camera. It doesn't take the best photographs in the world, but it performed above average in most of our tests and crams a robust feature-set into a relatively small design.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H3 is a great ultra-zoom camera. Its compact build makes it ideal for travellers and it has a boatload of features along with capturing some fairly good shots.

While it isn't the best ultra zoom on the market, Kodak's EasyShare Z812IS is a good all around package combining a ton of features with solid image quality and a big zoom. The high-definition video recording in particular will appeal to some users.

Nikon's CoolPix P60 is a good all around enthusiast compact which packs in a basic manual shooting mode with good image quality and a fairly petite design.

This camera has a big zoom for its size, and features some useful program modes and manual setting possibilities, but if you want super-crisp photos at a resolution higher than 1600x1200, you'll want to look elsewhere.

The Canon PowerShot Pro 1 is a well-featured 8Mp semi-professional camera that should suit users wanting digital SLR performance in a compact package.