Labs

The Caplio R6 has some unusual features, most of which are positive. The 7x zoom is the second largest here, and starts at a wide-angle 28mm focal length. However, the zoom lever leaps through the zoom range at breakneck speed, so it is hard to frame a composition accurately. Zooming and focusing is accompanied by loud, high-pitched whirring sounds, and focusing is slow in low light and telephoto zoom settings. The 1cm macro focus produced some extraordinary close-ups, although

The R6's face-detection mode managed to identify faces reliably and wasn't fooled by a strong backlight; most of the other cameras failed on one or both of these counts. Its image stabilisation was less impressive, though, with less than half of our stabilisation test shots blur-free.

Fussy autofocus aside, performance is excellent. It captured a photo every 1.4 seconds, and every 0.8 seconds after switching to manual focus. The 2.6fps continuous mode is the fastest we have seen from a compact camera and beats some digital SLRs, too. Browsing and deleting files on the camera is fairly slow, though.

The 7.1-megapixel sensor is the joint lowest here, but the R6 didn't embarrass itself for detail, except for the odd time when the autofocus misfired. Outdoor colours were excellent, but indoors, photos tended to be a little pasty and noise was higher than with the others in the group. Sadly, this takes the shine off an otherwise excellent camera.