Fujifilm X100S

£1,000 is a huge amount of money to spend on a compact camera, but the X100S has the charisma and charm to make people suspend their rational judgement. The gorgeous retro design closely resembles its little sibling, the Fujifilm X20, but manages to look even more handsome in its slightly larger body.

The retro styling is more than skin deep, though. There's an aperture ring on the lens and shutter speed dial on the top of the camera, recalling film cameras from a time before automatic exposure. Both controls have settings marked A for auto, and selecting program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority and manual exposure is simply achieved with these two controls – there's no need for a mode dial.

This will have camera geeks drooling, but things are even more exciting on the inside. Behind the 35mm (equivalent), f/2 lens sits an APS-C sensor – the same size that's used in consumer SLRs. While the X100S doesn't have the flexibility of interchangeable lenses, or even a zoom lens, its image quality should be on a par with SLRs, and the bright f/2 lens bodes particularly well for low-light shooting.

ROOM WITH A VIEWFINDER

The most remarkable feature is the viewfinder. There are pros and cons for both optical and electronic viewfinders, but the X100S takes no chances by including both. The electronic viewfinder (EVF) is a 2.36-million dot LCD, and it's one of the largest, most detailed EVFs we've seen.

The electronic viewfinder is just as big as a full-frame SLR's optical viewfinder, and extremely sharp too

A quick press of the lever on the front of the camera makes the electronic picture disappear in favour of an optical one. This view is even bigger; in fact, the scene that's shown is bigger than what the sensor captures. An electronic overlay is projected onto the view to show the frame that will be captured. After half-pressing the shutter button to autofocus, this frame will move as necessary to adjust for parallax error – for distant subjects it won't move at all, but for nearby subjects it moves down and to the right to reflect the relative positions of the lens and the viewfinder window.