If you need professional-class ruggedness on a budget, this is a real option.

Lovely to behold, a joy to hold – and even takes great photos

At first sight a pocketable gem, this all too often lives up to its budget price

A stylish compact camera that can’t quite compete with the best on image quality, but does wonders when darkness falls

Fujifilm’s FinePix Z1 is chic, clever and tough. It has a top look and feel, and is well worth the cash.

A great still camera with a decent movie mode. The restrictions on movie length mean it’s only any good for short video ‘snapshots’, though, and not ideal for that holiday of a lifetime

It might look like a DSLR, but it doesn’t handle as well and loses out to others with bigger zooms

Attractive styling and a long lens will tempt some, but we recommend spending more on a real SLR.

Easy to use and capable of good results, the superb range of manual modes makes this a good choice for enthusiasts.

The only compact to offer aperture and shutter priority, but overall quality is unspectacular.

With its slim dimensions, the FinePix F700 is almost the odd one out in this test. It’s certainly no IXUS, but the F700 will still fit into your pocket and the brushed metal casing looks the part. But the main reason the F700 costs more than the bigger S5000 is because of the new Super CCD SR. Instead of one photodiode per pixel, this fourth-generation CCD has two: a high-sensitivity one for shadows and mid-tones, and a low-sensitivity one for highlights. Fujifilm claims this gives a greater dynamic range, aiding tricky lighting situations by capturing shadow detail without bleaching out highlights.

The S5000 is one of the best-looking SLR-style digital cameras we’ve seen and comes from the same lines at the S602 Zoom. The plastic casing is solidly built but feels much lighter than the 448g our scales declared. This is mostly down to the excellent ergonomics – the hand grip is perfectly designed for one-handed shooting.

The Fujifilm FinePix 40i is one of a new breed that will perform both still and video capture as well as accommodate playback of MP3 digital audio

The test images taken at maximum quality and resolution show that the FinePix is quite capable of producing solid images

If were to believe the hyperbole, this technology will do for digital technology what the invention of the parachute did for skydiving.

High-performance digital cameras are appearing thick and fast at the moment. Take the innocent-looking Fuji MX-2700 (reviewed issue 21) and the Sony CyberShot DSC-55E (reviewed issue 22, p95): both are slim and sexy, yet boast resolutions of over two megapixel and features by the truckload.