Kodak EasyShare P880

It’s a brave company that withdraws from the high-end professional DLR market one week and then comes out with a pumped-up megazoom compact that it claims is more flexible than a digital SLR. So a warm hello to the slimline mini-SLR-shaped P880, a 5.8x zoom-lensed 8MP camera. It has a 1/1.8inch 8.1MP CCD, which delivers a maximum image resolution of 3264x2448 pixels, sufficient – assuming everything else is up to muster – for 16x12in prints. On the exposure side there’s a broad shutter speed range of 16-1/4000sec, four metering patterns with both exposure compensation and exposure bracketing

Samsung E-100RS

Our friends over at the Digital Photography Review website have now posted a preview of Olympus' upcoming E-100RS digital camera. The Olympus E-100RS first look doesn't attempt to draw conclusions yet since this speedy 1.5 megapixel camera with a burst-mode rate of 15 frames per second is a preproduction unit and hence can't really be judged on image quality or functionality. There are two pages of information on the camera layout and controls, along with a sample page with several images from the E-100RS. As with the E-10 preview we mentioned previously however, bear in mind when judging the samples that there's likely to be a significant difference between these and images from the final camera!

Canon EOS 20D

It's been four years and four months since they revealed the EOS D30, the first digital SLR which amateur photographers could really afford. So here we are, 52 months later with the latest incarnation of that original design, the eight megapixel EOS 20D. Not since February 2002 (the EOS D60) has Canon increased the resolution of this line of digital SLRs, in the EOS 20D we have a 1.9 million effective pixel increase, a new AF system, 50% faster continuous shooting and more than double the buffer space.

First impressions of the EOS 20D are good, it feels far less 'prosumer like' and instead feels more like a 'baby EOS-1D' (as described by one of our team). Gone are some of the annoyances of the EOS 10D, the 20D now switches on virtually instantly and focuses quickly, it feels very solid and yet weighs slightly less than the model it replaces. So far so good.