If you don't need a complicated SLR, then make sure you pick the best point-and-shoot digital camera you can afford. Today's smallest cameras might have wide-angle lenses, image stabilisation and touchscreen interfaces, but competition is still fierce.

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.

Photographers often use processing software like Aperture, Bibble or Lightroom to demosaic their shots—but what is this process, and why is it so important?

Smaller than SLR, but with more features than a compact, bridge cameras have always had a foot in both camps. Today, they're popular with people who want a good general-purpose lens in a reasonably-sized body.

Now that today's SLRs offer HD video, the distinctions between them, compact point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders are beginning to blur. The new interchangeable lens systems from Panasonic, Olympus, Sony and Samsung show how fast the market for digital cameras is changing.

They're as practical and easy to use as compact cameras, but they have interchangeable lenses and the kind of manual controls typically found in SRLs. These attractive new digital cameras, sometimes referred to as 'hybrid' cameras, can therefore be as appealing to beginners as they are to professionals.

Sony's version of the compact camera body with interchangeable lenses concept comes in the form of its new NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras. Here are our first impressions ...

When we explained how the size of a digital camera's sensor affects its performance, there was one detail we left out: smaller models are more susceptible to suffering from diffraction. With the latest 14 Megapixel cameras around the corner, it's time to take a look at this little-known optical phenomenon …

Beginners are often puzzled by their camera’s apparent inability to capture the exact same scene as their eyes can see. So why exactly does a camera see the world so differently to our eyes? Read on and I’ll try to explain.

The more pixels you pile onto a minuscule sensor, the less each is sensitive to the light. The result is that sometimes old 6 Mpx cameras give nicer images than recent 12 Mpx compacts. If you set your 12 Mpx at a lower definition, does this improve things?

Compact Flash cards aren't beaten yet! They're still round and, and are used in both SLR and bridge cameras. Let's see how the latest cards stack up ...

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.

Here you'll find our archives of bridge cameras from 2007 to 2009

Getting photos off your digital camera will be six times faster with a good card reader--and you'll save your batteries.

You'll find all the compacts we tested in the 2008-09 season. We won't be updating this archive, so for up-to-date models, you should visit the ongoing Product Survey.

Loved by some, derided by others, the built-in flash is now available on almost all cameras, with varying results. Lets take a look at some common settings.

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.

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.