Against all the usual IT norms, digital cameras (which we last reviewed in a group test here) aren't dropping in price. They still start at around £200 and you're still looking at twice that for one roughly equivalent in features to a compact 35mm film camera. For high resolution images, manual as well as automatic control and SLR functions, you will need to spend £600-£700.

Instead of price drops, what is happening in the market is an increase in the quality of image at each price point. The standard CCD array (the sensor inside a digital camera which captures the image) on a £400 digital camera is now 2.1Mpixels (mega-pixels), where it used to be half that. More expensive cameras often use 3.3Mpixel arrays for resolutions of up to 1600 by 1200 pixels.

The asking price of a digital camera equates to most of the total cost of owning one. If you expect to pay around £400, the only additional cost you'll have to consider is for photo paper and printer ink to reproduce your images. This isn't the case with a conventional camera, where in addition to its £150 asking price you'll have to pay around £15 per 100 prints. In the life of a typical camera, you could actually save money with the digital solution.

As well as cost savings, there's the extra convenience of printing images as and when you want them. Simple enlargements, individual prints and all the options opened by the use of image editing software increase the value of the digital solution.

Here are five new digital cameras you should seriously consider. Three of them cost under £350, while the other two (the Fujifilm and the Olympus C-700) are quite a bit more expensive.

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