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The Kodak EasyShare C875 is the kind of camera I would only recommend to beginners. While it does offer advanced manual control in the PASM settings, this is really a model designed for people who don’t want to think too much about how to take pictures, and just take them. The Kodak C875’s smart scene mode function is a great concept that produced nice if sometimes curious choices, with the camera often picking unexpected scene modes that, for the most part, helped capture better images.

The Canon G7 is excellent for many types of photography, so long as there’s time. It’s a camera for contemplative photography, not candid or action photography. While the Canon G7 has a very fast 0.07 second shutter lag when prefocused, it gets longer when you add the LCD display lag, making rapid model or child photography difficult. Those intending to photograph children will do better with an SLR. The Canon G7’s lack of RAW mode, an articulating screen, and other enthusiast features are a sign of the times.

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Canon PowerShots have always been big favorites of our readers, valued for their user-friendly design, excellent photo characteristics, and good build quality. The Canon PowerShot A640 follows suit, sporting an impressive 10 megapixel CCD and a very good quality 4x optical zoom lens. The Canon A640 offers everything from full automatic to full manual exposure control, with a healthy set of Scene modes thrown in to make it easy to bring back great-looking photos from what might otherwise be challenging situations.

The Nikon D40 stands up well against the competition—even those with higher resolution—with great image quality at all speeds, and near-perfect utility as a family camera. It’s tough to ask for more. The Nikon D40 lives up to our expectations, and even exceeds them. There’s no question that the Nikon D40 is a Dave’s Pick.

Though devoted Olympus users might be happy with the Olympus SP-510—warts and all—I struggled with this ultra zoom model in everything but the most ideal, perfectly lit conditions. This 7-megapixel camera has a 10x zoom, it uses digital image stabilization instead of the preferred optical image stabilization, producing slightly noisy, not always sharp, photos when fully zoomed in. I found the camera’s slow overall speed when taking pictures and performing basic functions to be irksome as well.