The HP PhotoSmart 850 has a huge protruding lens, and a fairly fast-responding display and a clever feature that turns off either the viewfinder or the LCD if not required (depending on which one you're using at the time).

The slimline HP Photosmart R607 follows on from the R707 in that it shares many of that camera's fine features and styling, including its plastic/magnesium-alloy casing.

Hewlett Packard's new digital camera takes many steps in the right direction to introduce professional-level features for the consumer photographer, yet suffers from a few, minor flaws that detract from its overall polished design.

Out of the box this camera produced beautiful results, despite being only 3-megapixels. It produced some fantastic images under our testing conditions and also in regular applications.

Along with the Sony Cyber-shot P-93, the Canon Powershot A95 is the big lad of this roundup with a pretty decent 5-megapixel CCD. The rest vary from 3-4-megapixel. While this does give the Canon a bit of an edge over the competition in terms of resolution and functionality, it's the camera's other attributes that cemented this unit in the top three.