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.

Another great Powershot entry by Canon, the A700 fulfils all the requirements of an advanced model, offering lots of functions, superb image quality, a big zoom and decent battery life.

With high levels of chromatic aberration and slow operation, the SP-350 is far from a perfect camera, but the images look great at smaller levels and so it could definitely be worth a look if you need a compact, powerful advanced model

A nice, cheap advanced 5 megapixel model. It doesn't have the best image quality in the world, but at this price it is a decent buy.

A bit of a let down compared to Panasonic's earlier models. If they could fix the camera's colour response they'd have a winner on their hands, but as it stands this mode isn't quite up to the high Panasonic standard.

A very respectable advanced camera model that is only really let down by noisy pictures.

A decent advanced camera that really only has its 10X zoom as a point of differentiation.

Whilst the V700 may have a solid design with an average feature-set, the image quality and shutter lag simply make it very difficult to recommend over any of the competition.

The Kodak P880 would have been a great camera but for problems with image quality, and massive write times for the advanced file formats.

A pretty solid advanced camera. It is functional, comfortable, has all the features one could expect, and above average sharpness. It is only let down by overly saturated pictures.

If you don't need to swap lenses, precisely focus manually or shoot more than three frames at a time, the DSCR1 is a better bet than a budget digital SLR.

The Pro815 is a good first attempt by Samsung, but it is missing a few things that would allow it to compete with the big guns. The most practical feature is the 15X zoom, and if that is important to you then this may be a consideration