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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.

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.

If you’re on a budget and looking for a camera that allows you to experiment with the more creative side of photography as you learn more about shutter speeds, apertures and so on, then the C875 is well worth considering. Like the best cameras in Canon’s A series it offers a wealth of controls, but - cruicially - it also offers very reliable ‘point and shoot’ operation, rarely failing to get a shot even in fairly challenging conditions. That famous Kodak color - if it’s to your taste - produces great looking prints ‘straight out of the camera’, and unless you’re looking very closely at the output on-screen and stick to lower ISO settings where possible, the output is surprisingly good.

The SD900’s biggest selling-point for us is simple; it offers some of the best (perhaps the best) image quality in this category, but if we’re being honest we’re not talking quantum leaps here, and the typical user of this type of camera, producing small prints, is unlikely to really see a significant advantage. If you like a touch of luxury (which the build and finish definitely give you) and want a ‘point and shoot’ camera that offers reliably high quality output suitable for decent enlargements, the SD900 is certainly a worthy competitor.