Best cameras and camcorders of 2007

With excellent video and performance, satisfying photo quality, a decent set of manual controls for the target audience, and a bundled FireWire cable, this is a great HD camcorder for deep-pocketed leisure shooters. Just make sure to play around with the camcorder's touch-screen interface before you buy; it's something you'll either love or hate.

With improved video quality, a slightly trimmer design, and upgraded software package, the Flip Video Ultra is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the emerging low-end digital camcorder category. It makes it very easy to capture and share low-resolution video via e-mail and the Web; we also appreciate that there's now one-touch video uploading to YouTube and AOL Video, and that the Ultra is compatible with Macs.

While the Canon PowerShot SD870 IS doesn't have an optical viewfinder or manual exposure controls, it captures beautiful images with its wide, 3.8x optical zoom lens and ranks among the top compact cameras we've seen. The highlights of this pocketable camera's bag of tricks are its impressive performance and image quality, optical image stabilization, and face detection.

It was released in 2006, but no sub-$1,000 dSLR released in 2007 has been able to outshine this shooter. Nikon scores big with the 10-megapixel, $900 D80 dSLR. Our admiration is due to its excellent color rendition and noise levels, an extensive feature set, a plethora of customization options, and lightning-fast performance.

Despite excessive noise at higher ISOs, Canon's A570 IS offers an excellent value and an impressive feature set in its category. The A570 IS includes a Digic III processor chip, which means it also has Canon's face detection. In our field tests, the system quickly and accurately identified faces.