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“The overall image quality is very good. The lens has fantastic centre sharpness, and the level of recorded detail is superb, among the best I’ve seen. Wide angle barrel distortion is kept to an acceptable minimum, and telephoto pincushion distortion is also thankfully mostly absent. There is some chromatic aberration toward the edges of the frame at al focal lengths, but again it’s kept to an acceptable minimum… The PowerShot SX10 IS is an expensive and quite complex camera, and not really suited for the beginner, however in capable hands it is capable of producing excellent results, and has enough creative versatility to do so in a wide range of situations. Build quality, handling, performance and image quality are all up to Canon’s usual high standard.”

“To be brutally honest, apart from the more powerful sensor the P5100 doesn’t offer a lot of improvements over the P5000. It has a new EXPEED image processor, supposedly the same one used in recent Nikon DSLRs, but apart from that the new camera shares virtually all of its features with its predecessor. That’s not a bad thing, because the P5100 is a well designed and nicely specified camera, but it would have been nice to see a few of its shortcomings addressed. The P5100 still has no Raw mode, no manual focusing and no adjustable white balance. It does have some limited manual image control, but not over colour or tone. If you already own a P5000 it’s really not worth upgrading. ”

“There’s very little to criticise in the overall specification and performance of the E-420. I like it’s size - it’s ideal for travelling and is reminiscent of my old OM4 in some aspects of its handling. Images are generally good too, with excellent sharpness and detail. Colour is crisp and while exposures are slightly underexposed to my taste, they do maintain good tonality throughout the range. The Four-Thirds system is somewhat contentious amongst the more vocal geeks on the forums, but it has many benefits and is definitely worthy of consideration to anyone coming to a DSLR for the first time. The Olympus E-420 is a pleasure to use and it’s simplicity combined with the more advanced features allows the newbie to learn and grow as well as just enjoying taking good images.”

“The J50’s biggest let-down is its image quality, which I can only describe as terrible. It’s a pity, because the lens actually performs very well, with virtually no distortion at either end of the zoom range, and good edge-to-edge sharpness, but it is let down by the lousy sensor. Even at the lowest ISO setting there are problems with image noise, and despite only having a maximum setting of 800 ISO, images at this setting are unusable. The combination of image noise and massive over-compression robs the images of any fine detail. File sizes at the highest quality setting average under 2MB, which is very small for an 8MP camera. Adding to these problems is very poor dynamic range, with shadow and highlight detail lost from high contrast shots. About the only good thing I can say about it is that colour rendition is fairly accurate, at least in good light and low ISO.”

“As with most industries producing consumer goods, digital camera companies will often make the most of their investment in research and development by launching several very similar models, reusing the same basic design and sharing most of their components and features, but differing in a few details to produce a range of distinct products. Sometimes the result can be surprising. For example the Panasonic TZ3 differs from the TZ2 only in the size of the monitor screen and an extra megapixel of resolution, but the result is a significantly better camera. However sometimes the surprise works the other way. Samsung has two very similar cameras in the 8.1-megapixel NV8 and today’s camera, the 10.1-megapixel NV15, but in this case adding more megapixels has not produced the desired effect.”

The Canon Digital IXUS 70 is a wonderfully stylish ultra-compact which offers lightning-quick performance, outstanding low-light ability and a useful range of features. Value for money is also surprisingly good for what is usually an expensive brand. Its picture quality isn’t perfect, but it can produce good results under difficult circumstances. For social photography and holiday snaps it will not often disappoint.