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So then, the W80 is a camera that is capable of producing surprisingly good results in good light at ISO 100 and is perfectly usable at ISO 400-800 in low light if you don’t want big prints (the church interiors in the samples gallery, for example, are better than I expected), but a camera that falls down in what I consider to be one of the most important areas for a camera such as this; pictures of people indoors in low light - with or without flash. If you’re after a ‘walk around’ camera for scenery then it’s not a bad buy for $200-ish, but if you actually have friends and family, and are still awake taking pictures after sunset it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it when there are so many better alternatives out there.

Overall I liked the DMC-L1 but it was never my immediate choice when I just needed to ‘grab a camera’ for a snapshot, it requires a little more consideration and can deliver great results once you work your way around it and tune the image parameters to your personal tastes. Unfortunately due to its price position it does have to go up against stiff competition such as Canon’s EOS 30D and now the cheaper Olympus E-510.

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Fuji has an amazing sensor and - to be brutally honest - an average camera. As with the F30 this is a camera that wins a Highly Recommended only if you regularly shoot in low light - if you only ever take pictures in blazing sunshine there are competitors with far more impressive feature lists or lower prices. But you just can’t take away from Fuji the fact that - at this moment in time - this unassuming little 6MP camera still sets the benchmark for image quality in the entire compact sector.

It’s well priced and easy to use, and - as long as you accept that there are always going to be compromises with a camera like this - capable of producing excellent results for normal print sizes or viewing at normal magnifications on-screen. Bearing all this in mind, take a look at the sample gallery to see for yourself if the output quality is acceptable. For us, the performance and feature enhancements are enough to make sure the question marks over the image quality don’t deny the TZ3 a Recommended rating.

Put simply, this is a competitive sector of the market, and the A20 - despite ticking all the right boxes on paper - simply doesn’t have what it takes to compete. For the typical user of a compact like this image quality (where the A20 does pretty well) is not the only measure of a camera, and it’s in these other areas the A20 fails to impress. There is enough here to lift the A20’s rating above the A10, but not enough to allow an unconditional recommendation.