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Canon put essence over style when it designed the PowerShot A590 IS, and in doing so it made a awesome camera. Whereas the clunky-looking 8-megapixel shooter looks bland when compared with colorful, ultraslim, style-minded cameras, its remarkable insides help produce some of the nicest photos you’ll shoot for less than $200.

The chunky, practical design gives the A590 IS a functional and easy-to-handle feel at the expense of aesthetics. A large protrusion houses the camera’s two AA batteries on the right side of the body and also provides a steady grip. The 2.5-inch LCD screen leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder, a convenient sliding mode switch, and several large, responsive buttons. While it won’t slip as easily into a pocket as an ultracompact camera, and won’t elicit any impressed gasps from your friends, the A590 IS simply feels comfortable to use.

Today electronic producer Sony corp. announced what it claims to be the smallest high-definition camcorder, the 10-ounce HDR-TG1 Handycam. Into this small package (1.3×4.8×2.5 inches), Sony sueezes most of the features that go into bigger models: including 1920×1080i resolution, a 10X optical zoom lens and face-recognition. It’s packed in a titanium shell with a scratch resistant coating that Sony calls “quite fashionable.”

What did Sony toss out to make it so nice? Not much. It doesn’t have optical image stabilization like some camcorders from Panasonic and Canon, and it doesn’t have a jack for an external microphone—but few cameras do have these features. But it has features that really do matter, like a largish (2.7-inch) LCD screen, and an HDMI port for plugging right into a high-def television. And the battery, which can’t be huge, still powers the camera for up to an hour and 35 minutes.

So can such a small camera take good video? Sony starts selling them in May, bundled with a four-gigabyte memory card for “about $900.”

The E-3’s photos look great. Especially, the colors are gorgeous: saturated, yet some of the most precise we’ve tested in this class (at low ISO sensitivities, at least), with impressive automatic white balance. The camera has a slight tendency to underexpose, but you can easily compensate for that.

The camera disappointingly maxes out at ISO 3,200, but its noise profile looks pretty good; I printed some 11×15 shots taken at ISO 2,000 inside Grand Central Station and found the noise pretty subtle. Nor do Olympus’ noise suppression algorithms overblur.

With the exception of its somewhat awkward design and interface, the Olympus E-3 stands up quite well to competitors such as the Sony Alpha DSLR-A700 and Nikon D300. But if you’re buying into a system, think carefully: Olympus currently offers only 13 pro-quality lenses, and the gap since the last pro dSLR release was about four years. Will that translate into problems for you down the road? Consider it before committing.

Do you need to get a pretty good digital camera but unexpensive price ? The Canon PowerShot A470 is one of the best examples. With a price tag less than $150, it produces surprisingly good pictures. It isn’t the prettiest camera available and it doesn’t have any flashy features, but for the price, it’s hard to beat.

Canon tries to serve the A470 a much-needed injection of style by offering four color choices: gray, blue, red, and orange. Sadly, colorful accents can’t hide the camera’s chunky, unattractive design. It feels like a king-size candy bar, measuring almost 4 inches long, 2 inches thick, and more than an inch and a half wide. At 7.6 ounces with an SD card and two AA batteries, it also weighs in as one of the heftiest budget cameras available. The lens and LCD screen both jut out uselessly from the body, giving it a bumpy, uneven feel. Compared with the huge selection of budget point-and-shoots on the market measuring just an inch thick or less, the A470 is downright huge. On the bright side, the camera’s large body makes it easy to grip and hold, and its wide design leaves room for large, simple controls that even bigger thumbs can comfortably manipulate.

Noise mars the A470’s otherwise very nice pictures. Grain starts to appear at ISO 200, and becomes quite noticeable at ISO 400. From ISO 800 to the camera’s maximum sensitivity of ISO 1,600, fuzz saturates the picture, giving everything a felt-like texture. Besides the noise, however, the camera’s pictures look good. Fine details appear crisp and clear, especially for a sub-$150 camera. Minor barrel distortion appears on the edges of pictures at the widest lens position, but it doesn’t seriously hurt picture quality. Colors look generally neutral, though they sometimes appear slightly cooler than usual. If you keep sensitivity low, the A470 will produce good-looking prints. Even at higher ISO settings, pictures look clear enough to e-mail or post to the Web.

The Canon PowerShot A470 is a great digital camera. The chunky, sub-$150 shooter doesn’t have many bells or whistles, but it shoots quickly in brighter light and produces very nice-looking pictures. It doesn’t work very well in low light, but that’s a flaw shared by most snapshot cameras in general. If you want to spend as little cash as possible for a decent camera, the PowerShot A470 is one of the best choices currently available.

This year, Panasonic launch Lumix DMC-FX500 pretty sweet point-and-shoot digital cameras. Its user-friendly camera. Panasonic’s made this model very intuitive with features novices and experts can appreciate. Many beginners are not familiar with their camera’s settings because, let’s face it, not everyone reads the manual or takes special photography classes.

The LUMIX DMC-FX500 has 3-inch touch screen on the back that allows users to quickly change the settings depending on the situation. For example, by selecting a person on the touchscreen, you activate the auto focus lock feature on the camera that keeps the subject in focus no matter what they do. Now you don’t have to worry about readjusting the camera every time. This is perfect for people who often take photos of moving subjects that won’t keep still, like fidgety children or pets.

opWith the touch panel, you can also tap on a subject and let the camera choose the right mode depending on the subject’s position. By touching a person’s face, the camera switches to portrait mode, or you can switch to macro if you want a close-up of a flower instead. Zooming in or out of a photo in playback mode is also possibly by moving sliders left or right on the touch screen.

The most affordable features LUMIX DMC-FX500 is that it can record video in high-definition at 720p and take still images in a 16:9 aspect ratio that can be viewed on a widescreen television. Other features include image-stabilization, face detection, automated scene-detection, a 25mm wide-angle lens, and 5X optical zoom.