Take away any one of these, and you risk having the perfect shot slip off into fleeting memory. The Canon, Fuji, and Toshiba models rely on custom batteries. The Fuji and Toshiba cameras let you charge the battery by simply plugging the camera into a wall socket. All but the Olympus D-340R offer a telephoto lens. The Casio zooms by 200 percent, the Canon by 250 percent, and the others by 300 percent.
All zooms are motor-driven, but some are more responsive than others.
All 14 cameras provide expandable memory in the form of a SmartMedia card or the more durable CompactFlash card. More memory means you can take more pictures at high-quality settings before you have to return to your computer and transfer the images to disk. Kodak's DC265 bests the others by shipping with a 16MB CompactFlash card. Epson's PhotoPC 750Z comes in second with an 8MB CompactFlash card and 4MB of flash RAM on board. Most of the other cameras include 8MB of removable memory.