8. Battery Life

The manufacturers have made huge progress with regard to battery lifetimes. This does not alter the fact that digicams are greedy by nature and that a battery has to have a lot of power if the user wants it to last. Rechargeable batteries are obviously the best, as they are less ruinous financially and more powerful than paltry alkaline ones. Kodak does best with a comfortable Li-Ion battery.

Canon, Sony and Fuji are just behind with two rechargeable Ni-MH AA batteries. These will last for 200 shots (including screen-on, zoom and computer download), that's a whole weekend of intensive use. Well done. Samsung has a Lithium CR-V3, which does pretty much as well as a Ni-MH battery, but does not recharge and costs a lot. Olympus stays faithful to its old AA alkaline battery, not a good idea we feel. Users are advised to invest in a set of batteries plus charger.

Software

The ideal thing would be to offer a complete image-processing package: capture, catalog, retouching, Web settings and page layout for printing. The perfect software package has yet to be invented, but we must say the manufacturers have made a good effort. Even so, in addition to the driver (essential even though automatic detection is increasingly common), Canon, Fuji and Olympus have a complete package containing all the features mentioned above.

Canon and Olympus also have an image-assembly system for panoramic views. Sony and Samsung are a bit lackadaisical with only Image Mixer and MGI PhotoSuite III, respectively. Not bad, of course, but not so impressive, either. Kodak does the "all-in-one" bit with its EasyShare solution for beginners. True, it's complete and has easy-to-understand automatic image resizing for email dispatch, but we found its retouching options a bit frustrating. Still, although nothing's perfect, we do have a soft spot for the Canon and Olympus offers, because they are versatile and efficient.