Now that our compacts come with wide angle, stabilization and a large screen, have they attained perfection? Of course not! The challenges to come centre on screen resolution, sensitivity in low lighting and of course the autofocus, still trailing the levels of performance given by digital SLRs.

Now that today's digital SLRs can shoot video, the distinction between them and compacts is smaller than ever. Those pushing Micro Four Thirds (µ4/3) as an alternative to both have understand the changing nature of the digital camera market. Change is definitely on its way …

We talk to you about it in all of our camera tests: managing sensitivity is a key challenge for today's digital cameras. It directly effects the quality of your photos at low light levels.

Digital camcorders are now a mature market, with around half of today's models filming in high definition, recording onto hardware that comes straight from the world of computers, like memory cards or hard drives. Users have benefited from both better quality and wider compatibility.

Do your photos indoors look too red? Or too blue when you go outside? It's almost certainly a problem with the colour temperature of your light source, but it's easy to correct by adjusting the white balancing of your digital camera.

Released in spring 2009, the Panasonic DMC-TZ7 has won many plaudits for its HD video mode, which, on paper looks like it could get close to rivaling a dedicated camcorder. But what's it like in the field?

Exposure, speed, aperture, ISO ... it's all rather complicated, isn't it? The fact that today's cameras take care of almost everything so well make some of these terms even more of a mystery. One setting remains in your control though: exposure compensation, which is easy to understand--and to use!

When cameras still used film, the photographic sensor was the same size for (almost) everybody, with rolls of 35 mm film in use everywhere from the simplest compacts to the most advanced SLRs. That isn't true any more with digital cameras, and it's often said that 'SLRs have better sensors'. But why?

A lot of you have been wondering whether HD video from a digital camera can really rival the quality of a dedicated camcorder. To find out, we put Panasonic's DMC-GH1 up against Sony's HDR-XR500 ...

The ideal camera has a wide angle, little noise in high sensitivities, a big screen, and is stabilized and fast. These little gems do exist and you will find good compacts at low prices.

Update March 15 2009: Following the arrival of the Panasonic G1, we've created a new Product Survey containing more recent digital SLRs and other cameras with interchangeable lenses. This Product Survey is an archive of our older tests of digital SLRs.

The sensors in digital cameras are getting bigger and bigger, and so are the size of files captured onto memory cards, but the memory you use can often be as important as the camera itself--especially when it comes to how long it takes to move your photos around.

Between compacts and reflex digital cameras, there is an intermediate category, the bridge. Bodies are larger than compacts, but we find all the manual functions, better quality and brighter lenses. And now, there is more often a big zoom.