Andrew Brt, Andrew Mager, Dave Carroll, Paul Jasper

If your budget for a new camera tops out at $200, you could do a lot worse than Pentax's Optio P70. This 12-megapixel point-and-shoot is easy to use and takes decent snaps. It squeezes in several neat features, including HD video capture, but achieving the low price did necessitate making a few compromises.

The silvery aluminum body of the version I reviewed appears a little cheap, but the white and red models are quite attractive--and alluringly slim. Despite being only 0.8 inch thick, the Optio P70 carries a 4X zoom lens with a 27.5mm wide-angle extreme that's great for shooting expansive panoramas. Unfortunately, the camera's shake reduction mode uses software to compensate for shaky hands, rather than shifting the lens or sensor mechanically.

If your budget for a new camera tops out at $200, you could do a lot worse than the Pentax Optio P70. This 12-megapixel point-and-shoot is easy to use and takes decent snaps. It squeezes in several neat features, including HD video capture, but achieving the low price did necessitate making a few compromises.

The silvery aluminum body of the version I reviewed appears a little cheap, but the white and red models are quite attractive--and alluringly slim. Despite being only 0.8 inch thick, the Optio P70 carries a 4X zoom lens with a 27.5mm wide-angle extreme that's great for shooting expansive panoramas. Unfortunately, the camera's shake reduction mode uses software to compensate for shaky hands, rather than shifting the lens or sensor mechanically.

If you often find that your friends wander off, birds take flight, or the sun dips below the horizon before you can press the shutter or adjust settings accordingly, the Samsung TL34HD ($300 as of 3/16/09) might be a good point-and-shoot camera option for you. The TL34HD eliminates a lot of the menu-diving that other feature-heavy digital cameras require.

The TL34HD's 3-inch touchscreen makes the camera a cinch to operate, and the icons that border the screen give an instant view of all your settings. Tapping each icon with your finger pops up a menu of alternatives. If you can't remember what each icon means, holding your finger on it for a moment brings up a written description.

If a camera can detect faces in your shots, then why shouldn't it find flowers and mountains too? The 12-megapixel Fujifilm FinePix F60fd ($300) adds automatic scene recognition to the face-detection abilities of its predecessor, the Finepix F50fd, which at one time was a Best Buy on our Point and Shoot Cameras chart.

When you point the camera at your subject, the F60fd's new SR-Auto setting evaluates the shapes, focus distance, and lighting conditions, then chooses one of four scene modes automatically. If a flower is close to the lens, it automatically sets a macro mode to focus on the fine detail. For low-light and night scenes, the camera adjusts the shutter speed and sensitivity to reduce blur. It chooses extra sharpness and depth of field for landscapes. And it optimizes the focus, aperture, and speed to keep all the faces it finds in portraits sharp and evenly exposed.

If you're an avid explorer (or a walking disaster), feast your eyes on the rugged charms of the Olympus Stylus 1050 SW. This pocket-size camera can endure a torrent of abuse, whether it accompanies you on outdoor adventures, joins you on underwater expeditions, or just constantly slips out of your pocket. According to Olympus, the $300 1050 SW can withstand drops of up to 5 feet, submersion to depths of 10 feet, and temperatures down to 14 Fahrenheit.

I didn't put all of those claims to the test, but as soon as my review unit arrived I did jump into my local swimming pool with it. The camera survived okay, and I got a few nice shots; but even wearing goggles, I had difficulty seeing the large 2.7-inch screen. As such, composing underwater pictures was mostly a matter of guesswork.

The PlanOn PrintStik PS910 portable printer is remarkably small, considering that it can print full letter-size pages. It measures just 1 inch thick by 2 inches tall by and carries 11 inches long (the same length as a sheet of letter paper). PlanOn designed this 1.5-pound unit for printing on the road from a laptop, a smart phone, or a PDA. In its quest for portability, however, the PrintStik may sacrifice too much functionality to appeal to more than a few users.

The PrintStik uses heat to print on a roll of thermal paper. Though this design decision keeps the mechanism small and simple, the resulting monochrome-only prints look like output from an old-fashioned fax machine. Text is fuzzy and uneven; and even at the highest quality setting, images appear as pixelated patterns of dots. Moreover, the pages curl up the way thermal-printed credit-card receipts do, and tearing the sheet from the printer leaves a rough edge.