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This story was printed from CNET Asia.
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In May, we saw Canon's Digital IXUS 860 IS fall off the charts but it seemed that consumers could not resist its charm and it bounced back to fourth place last month. Still hot, the Canon Digital IXUS 80 IS continued to be king of the heap with Fujifilm's FinePix following a close second. Panasonic took third with its Lumix DMC-FX36, though its other siblings the FX520 and TZ15 had dropped off the rankings. Olympus, Sony and Nikon continued to hang on with the Mju 1030SW, Cyber-shot DSC-T300 and Coolpix P80, respectively. But with Panasonic and Samsung having just announced their new lineup, we foresee changes to come.
The good: Ultra-high ISO sensitivity of 12,800; wide dynamic range; intuitive face detection; short shutter lag; 5x optical zoom with 28mm wide-angle lens; good image quality.
The bad: Relatively heavy; awkward positioning of flash, easily covered by fingers; lacks full manual control.
The bottom line: Despite an awkwardly positioned flash unit, the F100fd didn't disappoint with its enhanced feature set and excellent image quality.
The good: Impressive performance and image quality; optical image stabilization; face detection.
The bad: No manual exposure controls; no optical viewfinder.
The bottom line: While the Canon Digital IXUS 860 IS doesn't have an optical viewfinder or manual exposure controls, it captures beautiful images with its wide, 3.8x optical zoom lens and ranks among the top compact cameras we've seen.
The bottom line: Plain Jane styling and cluttered controls belie a wonderfully intuitive graphical user interface and some clever features. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W170 is a surprisingly adaptable camera that can be tweaked to take decent pictures in various environments.
The good: Fast performance; tons of handy image editing and playback features; zoom rocker is in a much more comfortable position.
The bad: Soft, noisy photos.
The bottom line: A great design, fast shooting, and lots of features can't overcome the fact that the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T300 simply doesn't take very good pictures.