Digicams: Comparison of Six 3-Megapixel

There are six members in the family of "good quality, easy-to-use cameras for snapshots without tears": Canon PowerShot A70, Fuji FinePix A303, Kodak LS-633, Olympus Camedia C-350, Samsung Digimax V3 and Sony DSC-P52. The only problem is choosing between them.

Inquisitive photographers who lurk around the shelves of electronics stores are not lacking in choices. They'll find a fine display of more than thirty digicam models in the 3-megapixel range alone, covering all brands, and with manufacturers even offering several versions of the same camera! It's hard to find your way around this tangle of pixels, so we chose six of them with the specifications, prices and performance that we found attractive.

The first bit of good news for the consumer is that 3-megapixel digicams now cost about the same as the earlier 2-megapixel ones. The market has evolved so much that, where the entry level used to be the domain of "small" resolutions, the 3-megapixel is now much more democratically priced and is positioned in the "low-budget amateur" sector. In the end, for the same amount of money, you can expect much bigger enlargements and better image quality. By the way, and this is the second good piece of news, the manufacturers (not all, but enough for it to be considered a trend) seem to have realized that nobody liked the "all-plastic" look and that a solidly-built device is an important criterion for purchase. So all in all, with 3-megapixel digicams available for less than $400, the picture is getting better all the time. And no one is likely to complain.

You will notice that Nikon is absent from this test. They could not ship us a sample of their latest Coolpix 3100 in time, though this camera definitely would have had a place in this report.