Labs

These days, how good a camera looks is almost as important as how well it performs. On this front, Samsung's lovely little Digimax L50 is a big hit. Its compact blue and silver aluminum-clad body makes it by far the sexiest camera in this group - and it has a large 2.5in LCD viewer too.

The L50 sits comfortably in your right hand with the controls falling neatly under your thumb. The only downside of having such a big screen is that there's no room for an optical viewfinder - so you won't be able to eke out any extra shots when your battery is running low.

The L50 is also stuffed

In addition, the movie mode is surprisingly good. It records in MPEG-4, allowing you to record long stretches of 640x480 footage in relatively little storage space. There's an anti-shake feature and you can even carry out basic photo editing. All this, and it's the cheapest model on test too.

Despite all its useful features, some important ones are missing. There is no aperture or shutter priority control for manual control over depth of focus and exposure, while the optical zoom is just 2.8x - the shortest on test. And its picture quality can't rival the other cameras.

Image compression is much more visible than with the other cameras here, objects take on colour fringes when shot against a bright background, and the camera struggles in situations where the light isn't ideal, smearing the detail of areas where colours are similar.

Otherwise the Samsung's L50 is small, sleek and a pleasure to use. Ultimately, its picture quality lets it down.