Some photographers want their cameras to have as much style as their photos. We lab-tested models from Canon, Olympus, and Sony (each is light, compact, and comes in colors) to see which one most befits a fashionista and delivers the goods.
Photograph: Marc Simon
Sony Cyber-shot DSC-L1
Its smart design, solid features, and dependable image quality made this Sony 4.1-megapixel camera our favorite here. It's also the heaviest, but that's like faulting Nicole Kidman for having an extra bowl of salad. The $279 DSC-L1 comes in four colors, and features a 3X optical zoom, seven scene modes, and a four-shot burst mode. In our tests, the DSC-L1 produced bright, vibrant color in outdoor and still-life shots, though the Canon (below) took sharper pictures, and at least one of the Sony's images exhibited a faintly reddish cast. 
Photograph: Marc Simon
Canon PowerShot SD20 Digital Elph
The $310, 5-megapixel SD20 has a superslim body, comes in four colors, and offers five scene modes. It's easy to use but suffers from one significant problem: There's no optical zoom--just a less-than-ideal 6.5X digital zoom. That flaw aside, the SD20 performed the best of the three cameras in our image quality tests, exhibiting vibrant color, good sharpness, and consistent exposure--though to be nitpicky, we thought its blues were sometimes too blue. 
Photograph: Marc Simon
Olympus Stylus Verve
The $310, 4-megapixel Stylus Verve comes in a wide selection of colors, including silver, white, black, copper, red, and turquoise. It has a 2X optical zoom, and its 1.8-inch LCD is the brightest of the bunch. The Verve gives you 13 scene modes, accommodating such specific lighting situations as candlelight and images appearing behind glass. Unfortunately, the camera's images weren't as sharp as those from the other two models we tested, though it performed on a par with the Sony DSC-L1 (above) in both exposure and color.
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