The Olympus wears a stripped down look up top there's only the shutter and power buttons, with the 5x zoom control shuffled on to a rocker on the back. This results in a clean-looking camera, but makes zooming a fiddly business.

Minor irritation aside, the Olympus is very nice to use, thanks to the speedy, responsive interface. Tap the OK button and you're presented with a good selection of settings to scroll cheetah-like speed. However, it only takes micro SO, which could be annoying if you have a load of regular -size SO cards lying around.

Name: olympus-vg130 (1).jpg Views: 63 Size: 29.8 KB

Photo quality is excellent too, particularly at the lowest ISO 80 setting. Plus there's a series of nice creative filter effects to apply to your photos, including a pretty decent fake fish-eye lens, and like the Canon it can shoot 720p video. Stuff says Equals the Canon on most counts, and with an extra screen thrown in. quality is decent, with little noise up to ISO 800, although it's no better than the others in terms of sharpness and colour. It's one of only three cameras in this t~t to shoot HD video and has several other nice extras; we especially like the panorama*assist and creative effect modes, in particular the high-contrast pink 'n' black 'Punk' setting.