The 10-megapixel Canon PowerShot SX1 IS is a reasonably small camera with an unreasonably powerful 20x zoom: it's the equivalent of a 28-560mm lens on a 35mm camera, and will take you quite effectively from a wide-angle landscape shot to a close-up of ...

At a $599.99 list price, it's certainly not the cheapest ultrazoom you can buy (the Nikon P90 sells for $200 less), but the SX1 justifies the higher price tag with good-looking high-definition video and impressive lab-tested image quality. You also ...

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 is a point and shoot camera with a trick or two up its sleeve: it can take panoramas in one pass, shoots good looking low light images and also captures high definition video. It also does a good job of capturing images and ...

The HX1 is a rather chunky camera: at just over 3 inches on all sides (and deeper with the lens extended when in use), it is definitely not pocket sized. But it does fit well into the hand, and the controls are well placed for easy use. The 3-inch LCD ...

The Olympus SP-590UZ brings the most powerful zoom lens available to the ultrazoom party, with a massive 26x (equivalent to 26-676mm on a 35mm camera). The $450 camera records 12-megapixel images, but unfortunately lacks HD video capabilities. As with ...

The most important of these photographic controls is the variety of shooting modes; the SP-590UZ has the full suite of manual, aperture priority, shutter priority and program (plus a number of automatic modes). There's also a good bracketing function, ...

The Nikon Coolpix P90 packs a 24x lens and a fair degree of manual control into an ultrazoom with a $400 price tag.

The obvious standout feature of the P90 is its huge zoom lens range, which provides the equivalent of 26mm-624mm on a 35mm camera. That's a substantial wide-angle along with the fantastic telephoto capability. The P90 also comes jam packed with a high ...

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX580 takes all the manual controls that power users so adore, combines them with an effective touch-screen augmented interface, and packs it all into a relatively small camera. Unfortunately, as much as we love some of the ...

The Panasonic's claim to fame is the extensive manual control you have over the shooting experience. It has a number of settings that usually are only found on SLRs. It's not very common to see a point-and-shoot camera with manual shooting mode, ...

The Nikon Coolpix S630, is an easy-to-use point-and-shoot, with a decent zoom and good still image quality, though light on the manual controls. It shoots 12-megapixel images, has a 7x zoom lens in a compact body, but is stuck with standard definition ...

One of the most immediately apparent features of the S630 is its distinctive curved design, which gives it a touch of visual flair, but retains an enlarged grip to make for easy handling. It also incorporates a scroll wheel on the back of the camera, ...

The Canon PowerShot SD780 IS is a sliver of a camera that's light on manual controls, but small enough to be taken just about anywhere. It's a camera that anyone can pick up and use, and comes in a variety of bright colors. It has a 3x zoom lens, ...

The SD780 is less than 3/4 of an inch thick, and is slim enough to fit into even the tightest of pockets. Interestingly, Canon added an optical viewfinder to the camera. It's so tiny as to be almost useless, but at the same time, it's better than ...

Samsung's most recent entry into the burgeoning field of compact ultrazooms comes packed with a 10x zoom 24mm wide-angle lens and a decent set of manual controls. While the camera is far too big to fit into your skinny jeans when you go out clubbing, ...

One feature we really enjoyed about the HZ15W was the amount of manual control on offer. In addition to program mode, and a truckload of scene modes, it has fully manual exposure controls. However, you can only set the aperture in this mode to ...

Fujifilm has developed an interesting new image sensor technology, and the FinePix F200EXR is the first model to use this new hardware. The new sensor can halve its 12-megapixel resolution, and switch into either a mode designed for lower image noise ...

We were very impressed by the level of control that the F200EXR offers. At reduced resolution, it can take photos at up to ISO 12800. There are aperture priority, shutter priority and manual modes. It also has wide variety burst modes, but they're ...

The Casio Exilim EX-FC100 takes the impressive speed of the EX-F1 and EX-FH20 and squeezes it into a much smaller, $330 package. It shoots nine-megapixel images, or six-megapixel photos at 30fps. It can also record slow motion video at 1000fps (224x64 ...

The strength of the EX-FC100 is obviously in its extreme speed. In other features it was noticeably lacking, including its pedestrian LCD, cramped controls, and illogical menu system. However, many of these small problems pale beside the ability to ...