Labs

The P880 is a little taller and skinnier than most of the other cameras here. It has a relatively meagre 5.8x zoom, but the extra height provides room for a 21/2" LCD screen and a great number of single-function buttons.

There are lens rings for zoom and manual focus and the focus ring is quite easy to use, with a zoomed picture-in-picture displayed onscreen. A single dial controls aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation,

Battery life is excellent, producing 491 shots from a single charge. However, this might be partly because the camera's processor is under-specified. The P880 managed to take a picture every two seconds, but after nine shots a message appeared saying "Processing". This rendered the camera inoperable for around 20 seconds. Our SD card was fast enough to record the data, so we assume the chip used to process and compress shots was causing the bottleneck. Continuous mode suffered a similar problem. Auto-focus is slow, too, taking at least a second and often much longer to find its target.

Image quality was poor in the face of such stiff competition. Images didn't display the detail we'd expect from an 8-megapixel camera, noise was evident at ISO 200 and tricky lighting conditions tended to produce flawed images on automatic settings. The P880 is cheaper than most cameras here, but Canon's S2 IS costs less still and is a better camera