9. Speed And Responsiveness

A good digicam should be fast and responsive in order to be a pleasure to use. Being quick to power up (the time it takes before you can start using the camera), but also quick to record and focus, are two more essential parameters. At five seconds, Kodak and Fuji are slow to power up. They are followed by Olympus, with 4.5 seconds. The others are faster (three seconds for Canon, 3.8 for Samsung and 2.2 for Sony).

There is not much to choose from in the speed of autofocus: 1.1 seconds for Samsung, 0.9 for Kodak, Canon and Olympus, 0.8 for Fuji and 0.7 for Sony.

High-definition file recording time can almost double depending on the camera, though none of them is really slow. Three of them are very fast: under two seconds. The respective times for each are: 2.1 for Kodak, 2.3 for Sony; 2.4 for Fuji, 1.7 for Samsung, 1.5 for Olympus and 1.4 for Canon.

A final point on image freeze while focusing: only the Fuji A303 is (slightly) affected. It seems the manufacturers have gotten their act together.

Image Quality

By image quality we mean color, detail and consistency of contrast. It is difficult to make an objective judgment on these aspects.

We used the six cameras in the usual conditions: indoors, parties, exterior landscape views, street scenes, macro, complex lighting (like photo expos), portraits, family scenes and even reportage. The first thing to say is that they all produced similar sorts of snaps.

In general, there were no "bad" pictures, but there were small defects, which were more or less noticeable or more or less important. The first bad mark applying to all of them is the "video" result. It is quite noticeable on the Sony and Kodak, less so on the others. Don't worry though, it's another question of taste. For the other points, all six are well-rated for exposure, even if it is easy to trick them. The Result programs work well, but focusing is quite often a shambles when taking photos indoors at parties, for example. Canon, Fuji, Sony and Olympus do better than the others in this respect. Image detail is never exceptional (even rather second-rate on the Kodak), but results are adequate and can be enlarged to A4 with no problem. In the end, the ones we feel produce the best pictures are Canon, Fuji, Olympus, Samsung and Sony. They are all pretty much the same, except for the Kodak, which is more prone to noise and overexposure than the others. Sony is out of the leading four on account of its shorter zoom range. If we want to nitpick a bit more, we can say that the Canon's photos are a bit clearer and have better contrast than the others, but the difference is minimal. And just behind the A70 is the Olympus, which also does very well. In short, congratulations all around.