The digital camera market continues to grow apace, with more and more people being converted to the convenience and flexibility of electronic images. Although the initial cost of a digital camera still acts as a barrier to their mass adoption, digital photography is no longer just the realm of the early adopter and the computer nerd.

Just to run through them one more time, the main advantages of digital over conventional silver halide photography are as follows:

• You can see what you've taken instantly on the camera's monitor display and retake if you're not happy with what you've captured. If you delete an image, the memory it occupied is immediately available for reuse.
• You keep and print just the images you want, rather than developing 24 or 36 prints to find that perhaps a third of them are not up to your standard.
• You can print, e-mail and incorporate the images you've taken into a wide variety of different types of document.
• You don't have to wait, even an hour, before seeing your images. You can display them on a monitor or TV screen and print them out, at a variety of sizes, on your own printer.

Here we look at five models from leading manufacturers with a list price of around £400. By checking sites on the Internet, most are available for around a hundred pounds less than that, so these are the 'street' prices we've quoted. Our test images were taken in quick succession, so the lighting conditions were similar for all.

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