Labs

At first glance, the Fujifilm FinePix F20 is an unassuming-looking camera with unremarkable specifications. Behind the 3x zoom lens there's a 6.3-megapixel sensor, while the 2.5in screen is clear, though nothing special. The use of xD memory cards is unfortunate as they're slower and more expensive than SD cards, and it'll be even more annoying if you already own one or more high-capacity SD cards.

That's the bad news over though, and pretty much everything else about the F20 is excellent. It performs well, taking two seconds to switch on and take a picture, and 1.9 seconds between subsequent shots.

The menus are quick to navigate and a switch on the top of the camera selects photo or video mode, the latter giving excellent results in our tests. As is usual at this price, manual exposure and focus aren't available, but there's a good collection of other controls to allow experienced photographers to tailor the camera's behaviour. Meanwhile, casual users will appreciate the 15 scene presets.

The light fantastic

The jewel in the F20's crown is its image quality. Using the same lens and CCD sensor as the acclaimed FinePix F30 (issue 186), it's capable of stunningly sharp images that put many

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higher-resolution cameras to shame. We did spot some purple fringing in high-contrast scenes, but the problem was infrequent and far from disastrous. Colours were consistently excellent, producing flattering skin tones in a range of lighting conditions.

The F20 was at its best in low light. Even at ISO 400, pictures were cleaner and sharper than many other cameras managed at the best of times, although noise reduction processing did shed a little detail compared with the camera's ISO 100 setting. The ISO control goes all the way up to 1600, allowing for fast shutter times in gloomy environments. The resulting shots exhibited some noise and fine details looked blotchy, but they were still perfectly presentable.

Fast and furious

Our only gripe is that Fujifilm seems to think the F20's high-ISO performance is even better than it is. During outdoor and flash photography, automatic settings sometimes used a very fast shutter speed and an unnecessarily high ISO speed. The results were still excellent, but by lowering both settings they could have been even better. Meanwhile, in low light the camera was a bit too quick to jump to its ISO 1600 setting, which reduced detail.

There is an option to limit the ISO range to between 100 and 400, but this can lead to blur-inducing long shutter speeds in low light. The upshot of this is that, for the best possible images, it's worth familiarising yourself with the various ISO options and what the resulting pictures look like.

Picking a winner from the three best cameras wasn't easy - we would be delighted to own any of them. However, we went with the Fujifilm because it's more compact and affordable than the Canon and we found that in practice its excellent pictures in low light were more valuable than Panasonic's image stabilisation.