New camera round-up: Six of the best

We like the sound of the Ricoh R7 compact camera. It comes in silver, black and orange shades, and does everything a compact should these days. There's a pleasingly large 69mm (2.7-inch) LCD, face recognition and optical image stabilisation. The body is a respectable 21mm at its thinnest point, and contains a thumping great 7.1x optical wide zoom lens (28–200 mm in 35mm camera format). On top of that, there's a truly impressive 10mm macro function.

As if that wasn't enough, you get not one, not two, but three different types of automatic bracketing functions, which present you with a choice of the same picture taken at different settings of either exposure, white balance or colour. Fortunately there's not long to wait because the R7 will be available in September for a weighty, but quite possibly worth it, £230.