1. Compact Digital Cameras 2009

This roundup includes products released within one year preceding the publication date of this article. The product selection consists solely of review units made available to Tom’s Guide by vendors. While the products listed here do not constitute a comprehensive listing of all products in the category, they do represent a broad range of what is available to consumers in this category. We will quickly update this roundup with new products as they become available to Tom’s Guide, and soon add data relating to product specifications and test dates. In other words, these roundups are a work in progress. Please check back frequently to see what’s new.

Now that our compact cameras come with wide angle lenses, image stabilization, large screens, have they attained perfection? Of course not! The challenges to come center on screen resolution, sensitivity in low lighting and, of course, the autofocus, still trailing behind the levels of performance in digital SLRs.

However, the quality of compact digital cameras is still progressing. A wide-angle lens is now a given for all mid- and top-range models, and screens are regularly larger than 3 inches. There are however notable differences with respect to other functions:

Speed: this is no longer simply a question of the camera's age. Some are quick to start-up and focus while others are not so speedy. The really slow camera has more or less disappeared however, and it is rare to wait more than two seconds at start-up or between two photos; autofocus usually takes under a second. Note that some models now have continuous autofocus, meaning that there is less latency when you shoot. Unfortunately, autofocus time is still a weak point on compacts.

Lens quality: a good lens is expensive. No miracles here, even though some entry level Panasonics and Canons do give surprisingly good results. Some lenses are not as well made as they could be, and others fail to capture fine detail on the edge of the frame.

Sensitivity: there has been a remarkable jump forward over the course of the last twelve months from all manufacturers. However, differences do persist. Fujifilm is still leading the pack with its Super CCDs, but these are unfortunately only available with some cameras in the F and S ranges: they allow you to go for 800 ISO without a second thought. Canon is catching up, as are Sony and Panasonic. Even makes such as Ricoh, Pentax, Nikon or Samsung now give acceptable results at 400 ISO.

Resolution: at the risk of repeating ourselves, who really needs 15 Megapixels on a compact? With a maximum resolution of 300 dpi currently the print standard, 15 Megapixels make your print 30 x 40 cm, or the size of an A3 sheet! Experience shows that 95-percent of users never print larger than A4, and even with radical resizing, that same percentage, when applied to screen viewing, doesn’t require this amount of detail for everyday use of photos. 10 Megapixels is now the common standard on entry level models, and is largely sufficient for the vast majority of users.

In our tests, we systematically include images at different ISOs: full size images of photos taken from the lowest to the highest sensitivities. You need to get used to them to judge them properly: some very high res cameras show noise rapidly, but the faults are lost in the final image. Nevertheless, this is a good indication of what you can expect from any resizing, and the intrinsic image processing capacities of the camera.