Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900

When it comes to style, critics agree that the svelte Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900 rules the fashion runway. At just 0.6 inches in depth, the sleek T900 is "barely there," says CNET's Joshua Goldman. The brushed metallic camera comes in four colors -- silver, red, bronze and black -- and its slender frame is graced by a gorgeous 3.5-inch LCD touch screen display. With 920,000 pixels, the screen packs nearly four times the resolution of LCDs on most compact digital cameras. In addition to a 12.1-megapixel sensor, there's a 4x optical zoom lens with optical image stabilization. Plus, the zoom works in HD movie mode -- a rarity among compacts and shared only by Canon's PowerShot SD970 IS. The T900 delivers plenty of point-and-shoot convenience including face and smile detection and intelligent scene recognition, automatic macro mode and exposure bracketing.

Many of the T900's features are designed to retain its slender profile but come with trade-offs in performance. For instance, the touch screen eliminates the need for many traditional controls, but as CNET's Joshua Goldman says, touch screens aren't for everyone, and fingerprint build-up can be a nuisance. The screen is also marred by a sluggish, inaccurate menu interface. It is "an odd combination of very simple and slightly confusing," says Tim Barribeau of DigitalCameraInfo.com. Settings often vanish when changing menus.

To minimize the camera's depth, the zoom lens doesn't extend out, but at the highest zoom, the camera produces mixed shooting performance. Barribeau's tests show distortion, chromatic aberration and a limited aperture range, although he places image quality slightly ahead of the Casio Exilim EX-FC100 (*Est. $290). Across the board, however, HD video quality fares well, although the heftier Canon PowerShot SD970 IS (*Est. $320) outranks the T900 for its superior image quality.