Clever-clogs cameras are your flexible friends.
EXTREME SPORT
Typically £250, or £214 from www.pixmania.co.uk
Ever ruined a camera by wading into a river with one in your pocket? If so, consider the Mju 720SW. Olympus claims it is waterproof to 10ft and can survive a drop of 5ft. We flung ours into a sinkful of water — and the Mju still worked. The ideal family camera, then: hand it to Junior and rinse off the sand later. The Olympus’s image stabilisation will suit grown-up kids playing hard in a snowboard park too. The tough body doesn’t make the Mju 720SW especially big or heavy, and results from its 7Mp sensor and 3x zoom are good enough to justify it as a picture-taker alone.
Other camera reviews
Sony Cyber-shot T10
Fujifilm FinePix F30
Panasonic DMC-LX2
Nikon CoolPix S7c
Canon PowerShot A700
Jargon buster
Digital noise Flaws in a digital camera’s pictures resulting from sensor limitations
ISO The rating of a camera sensor’s light sensitivity, once a maximum of 400, but now higher ratings enable low-light photography
Image stabiliser Integrated technology that compensates for camera movement as you take a picture. Also known as antishake
Megapixels Number of camera-sensor pixels, measured in millions. 6Mp is plenty for compacts, although you can set it lower: 3Mp is fine for 6x4in prints, 5Mp for A4
Sensor Light-sensitive chip that replaces film in a digital camera. The larger the better
WiFi Wireless connection used for e-mailing an image or transferring from camera to PC
Zoom Digital zoom enlarges part of the image but with loss of quality. With optical zoom the lens magnifies the image without any loss of quality
Research supplied by What Digital Camera magazine
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