Im hoping you can help me, I am going on holiday and need a new digital camera. Ideally I want a slim line small with a zoom and not sure of the best option as there are so many out there. With the prices of today being so competitive I don't believe its necessary to spend 100's. The question - which make, should I go for 12 mpixels and most competitively priced and where to get it.. any advice will be a huge help. Thanks

There's actually little point in massive mega-pixels if they are obtained through the small format sensors used in point and shoot and compact cameras the pixels just interfere with each other. Canon have brought out their latest high-end compact with less mega-pixels than its predecessor, for one, and for two most basic cameras are set up to use a whole lot less pixels on the factory default settings, and hardly anybody notices/cares/does something about it. Don't put the pixel-count in first place: the obsession with pixels is an industry manipulated ploy to get consumers to spend too much!

Most important is what you want to do. Just "holiday" doesn't help much: some folk holiday in cities like Florence and need to have a well-equipped DSLR camera to make the most of the holiday, while other folk move into a chalet almost on the beach so their kids can enjoy the sand and the sea while they catch up on resting, and only need a good point and shoot or maybe a simple compact.

If you could say what style of holiday photography floats your boat, and how much you want to spend, someone will give you, I am sure, an excellent reply.

mega pixels arent the most important factor anything 8 plus is fine unless you want posters everytime , optical zoom is more important not digital and a few decent modes will help you esp if your not photo savvy :)

In additional to optical zoom I'd also look for some method of image stabilization: and anything over about 7 megapixels should do the trick. If you're photographing towns or buildings a wider angle of lens would also be good - say an equivalent of a 24 or 28mm lens on a 35mm film camera - but don't forget the option of stitching digital pictures together to form panoramas or wider angles if all else fails. And then there's the battery question - a really slim camera you will always carry with you (my choice is a Nikon Coolpix S50 which Nikon has probably superseded by an even better version) with a thin proprietary battery of which you might need three in total and always also remember to carry your charger somewhere handy - or one which uses AA rechargeable batteries (they'll also need to be charged) which in a crisis you can always replace by conventional AA batteries bought from a local shop.

i bought the sony dsc-w215 for £129 last week 4 x op zoom and 12 mg pixels, so an obvious choise for picture quality. Avoid at all costs. has a design fault that causes "smearing" coloured lines across the image finder when taking shots in bright light. on very bright days you can just about make out the image on the back screen due to smearing by coloured lines across the screen. The lines remain on the videos taken. Fault acknowledge by sony and noted in manual.

Replaced today with a Samsung Slime line ST50. No problems to date 12.2 mg pixels and 3 x optical zone. black is available at £129 but got grey at £139. Picture quality is good for the price range i wanted. The zoom quality is good for up to 12 inches + distance any closer can blur. but I 'm not taking detailed professional pictures e.g for publishing

hope this helps

OK, but can we please drop the obsession with megapixels? Very few people with a PAS or compact, packing 12 megapixels, for example, know how to set up their camera to work at the its maximum megapixels without consulting the manual and taking a lot of time.

People who are content with getting good pics of family and friends should look at the megapixel comparison between two similar cameras after they've compared everything else, unless they buy from a clear-out sale or second-hand.