Point-and-Shoots With Great Image Quality

Picking the camera with the most megapixels means you'll get the best image quality, right? Wrong! As you'll see in this slide show, megapixel counts are often meaningless when it comes to choosing a point-and-shoot camera that takes the best-looking photos. The cameras featured here range from a whopping 14.7 megapixels to a modest 6-megapixel resolution.

In the PC World Test Center, we test all cameras' imaging quality by running 8-by-10 prints of images taken with them through a series of jury-judged comparative tests. Our panel of judges rate each camera's color accuracy, exposure and flash quality, distortion levels, sharpness, and overall image quality as compared with the competition. To get the complete story on how we test digital cameras, watch our video.

And now, for overall image quality, here are five of the best point-and-shoot cameras that we've tested in the past year or so.