I know fuck all about cameras but as a which magazine subscriber
2 panasonics come out on top. first one is lumix dmc-fz30 £250ish scoring 73% or dmc-fz8 £210ish scoring 71%.
If you want me to look up one that you've seen, i'll do the honours
dmc-fz30
The 778 gram 8Mp Panasonic DMC-FZ30 is a great camera, one of the highest scoring ever. It combines good image quality - very good in manual mode - with an excellent range of features.
The FZ30 is fast. Shutter delay is an outstanding 0.1 seconds, well into Digital SLR territory. On pressing the on button, it takes 1.9 seconds to be ready to take a photo. Again this is very quick for a compact camera. The time it takes the camera to ready itself for a new photo after taking the last one is a reasonably quick 2.2 seconds.
dmc-fz8
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8 is an easy Best Buy, and as a compact(-ish), versatile camera with lots of features and a big zoom, it's hard to beat. This is a highly impressive camera, and one of our favourites.
This model’s predecessor, the FZ7, was one of the best long-zooming cameras around, so we had high expectations of the FZ8 – and we’re not disappointed.
these both look like pro-styie cameras rather than what I'd consider a traditional looking digital camera so the best 'normal looking' gets a score of 68% fujifilm finepix f30 £100 and is described as follows:-
One of the key features of the Fujifilm FinePix F30 is the maximum ISO setting of 3200, meaning that it’s a great camera for taking pictures in dim light without flash. In fact, it’s a very good camera all round – and at 192 grams with compact dimensions it’s nice and portable too.
Picture quality on the F30 is very good, noise is kept under control well. Shutter delay is also reasonably good at 0.4 seconds, although shot to shot time in burst mode is slow – almost 1.8 seconds. At least the burst mode is unlimited.
