Olympus SP-800 UZ

Three of these are for high-speed continuous capture, but these are only available at reduced resolution (10.2fps at 5 megapixels or 15.2fps at 2 megapixels - use these only when you do not plan on making big prints).

All of the sample images in this Review were taken using the 14 megapixel JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 6Mb.

That's what Olympus still calls them when they appear in a DSLR or Micro Four Thirds camera, but ever since the introduction of the mju Tough 6010, they have been calling them Magic Filters on their compacts.

With an impressive ISO of up to 3200 sensitivity (unfortunately, the higher the ISO, the higher the distortion and graininess when enlarged for prints) you can also take excellent shots of moving subjects.

By using Panorama function you can take up to 3 shots manually or automatically and the camera's computer "stitches" them together into one panoramic wide angle shot.

The Pop Art filter boosts saturation and contrast, the Pinhole filter alters the colours somewhat and adds a very obvious vignetting effect, the Fish-eye filter causes straight lines to bend outwards as if the picture was shot with a fish-eye lens (it does not recreate the ultra-wide angle of view though), while the Drawing filter does exactly what it says on the tin and converts your photos into black-and white drawings.

There are several shooting modes available and the camera has a small user-friendly internal manual to explain each mode and what flash, ISO, aperture, white balance settings are available for each mode, making taking pictures almost foolproof.

The zoom is incredible and and super close up pictures are the best I've ever taken.

What's amazed me most, especially at this price point, is the sharpness of the images across the zoom range.

The 30x zoom lens of the SP-800UZ handled chromatic aberrations pretty well for such a long zoom, but in some cases, coloured fringes were in evidence along contrasty edges.

The 2GB of internal memory is super nice as is the cameras small size and lightweight.

The camera is remarkably lightweight, but that's not necessarily 100% positive news.