Ever since the dawn of the digital camera age Olympus has graced the market with a series of excellent products. Its C-800L may have had a lukewarm reception, but the C-820L soon rectified that.

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

Panasonic has gone above and beyond, releasing its NV-GS35 with its massive 30x optical zoom, dwarfing the usual 20 or so times zooms found on other cameras.

It used to be a case of whoever had the largest CCD was going to sell the most cameras.

It used to be a case of whoever had the largest CCD was going to sell the most cameras.This may have held true when there was only a handful of digital still cameras on the market, but today it is a different story.

The first thing that struck me about the Camedia C-990 Zoom was that it looks and feels like a camera.

Undoubtedly the key feature of the Olympus C-750 is the huge 10x optical zoom lens. This is ideal for sports photography or getting close to camera-shy subjects. We’d expect a lens of this size to introduce severe chromatic aberrations, but Olympus has used extra-dispersion lenses, which make sure light is evenly distributed across the CCD.

HP is better known for printers than it is for digital cameras but it has discovered a new talent that must be sending a shiver down the spine of more traditional camera makers such as Canon, Olympus and Nikon.

An 18x zoom in a compact, well-built body. General handling and image quality are great too.

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.

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.

We get our hands on Olympus’s newest additions to the mju range, including one with a 7x optical zoom and one waterproof to 10 metres.

Canon's new 600i series of digital video cameras doesn't offer any major changes to the 500i series, just a continuing improvement in quality and a few nice extras. The cameras still look the same and are just as easy to use, but the new top of the range 650i is about as good as you are going to get in its price range.

Taking great photos in most situations, the DSC-W50 is a bargain at this price.

Good quality and with a proper li-ion battery, but expensive and bulky compared to the Olympus.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago what the advantages of eight megapixels (MP) were over five, I would have said very few. However, that was before I discovered the fun factor in being able to play with an image that is up to 115cm by just over 86cm (72dpi).

Not the slimmest any more, but still amazingly compact. A very capable cam if you don’t mind the menus

No match for Sony’s SR12 on features, but incredibly easy to use and an ideal ‘my first HD camcorder’

The AF could do with being a bit quicker, and a longer zoom would be good, but it’s still a gem

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