Top Point-and-Shoot Cameras With Manual Controls

The G12 delivers excellent image and video quality, and it backs up its manual controls with fun scene modes, an optical viewfinder, and a tilt-and-swivel LCD screen.

Nikon's Coolpix P7100 is as complex as it is powerful, with excellent image quality and a feature set strong enough to please even the fussiest photographer. Just make sure you're up to the challenge.

The Canon PowerShot S100 is just about the most capable compact camera we've seen, and it's packed with features that will please both novices and advanced shooters.

The PowerShot S95 is a perfect camera for beginners to grow with, thanks to its compact, pocketable size and its compelling blend of automated and manual controls. It offers very good image and video quality, too. Unfortunately, battery life is disappointing, the design has no raised hand grip, and the burst mode is slow.

The Lumix LX5 isn't the most novice-friendly camera--some settings are buried deep in menus--but it offers an insane amount of power for a fixed-lens camera when you dig into its manual controls. It has an ultrawide-angle lens with an F2.0 aperture, and Macro mode lets you get extremely close to your subject. Intelligent Auto mode produces underexposed images, though, and the optical zoom range is limited.

Compact for a pocket megazoom camera, the 14X-optical-zoom PowerShot SX230 HS adds a new sensor, 1080p video capture, good high-speed shooting, and in-camera GPS to the mix. It sports manual exposure and focus controls, as well. Note, however, that the GPS function drains the battery quickly, and the macro mode is mediocre.

The Nikon Coolpix P300 offers great hardware and performance for its price, with a bright F1.8 lens, manual aperture and shutter controls, and a very easy-to-use interface. It captures excellent low-light photos in particular. You'll find neither manual focus nor a RAW shooting mode.

The Olympus XZ-1 is a manual-oriented camera with great optics (F1.8 aperture at the wide-angle end, F2.5 at telephoto) plus unique scene modes and art filters. As for weak spots, the autofocus struggles in low-light and macro modes, and in our tests the camera produced underexposed images in iAuto mode. It's not entirely novice-friendly, either, as it requires a lot of menu-diving.

The Samsung TL500 has some drool-worthy specs--including an ultrawide-angle lens with F1.8 maximum aperture, plus in-camera retouching for RAW images--and it shoots great photos, with excellent dual-image stabilization. It stumbles on usability and video quality, unfortunately, and its macro mode isn't as effective as that of competing cameras.

The 15X-optical-zoom (24mm to 360mm) FinePix F550EXR has standout GPS features and in-camera extras that go beyond the norm, such as high-speed video and burst modes. But in image and video quality, it lags a bit behind competitors: JPG images come out soft-looking, for instance, and shadow image noise appears at low ISO settings.

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