What's the best ultra-compact camera your money can buy?

Before buying a digital camera, it's best to decide on a budget.
But after you decide on a budget, how do you pick a camera? Here's how.

So you've decided you want to buy an ultra compact camera. One that would fit in your pants pocket and would hopefully be able to produce reasonable, if not excellent photos.

The first thing you should do before buying any camera is decide how much you're willing to spend. Otherwise, you'd find yourself lost in a sea of opportunities, features, zooms and apertures, varying across price ranges, making it very hard to make a decision.

Best Ultra-Compact up to $100

Well, actually just above $100, the Canon PowerShot ELPH 100 comes in at $109, offering a wide set of features seldom seen in such low-priced cameras. It has a 28mm optically stabilized lens and a x4 zoom range in a 140 gram body, a 1/2.3" CMOS sensor enabling full HD videos - however with mono sound only and with no optical zoom during videos.

It's a lot of a camera for its price with and convenient additions such as a direct video button and image quality rivaling much more expensive cameras.

Canon PowerShot ELPH 100

Best Ultra-Compact up to $150

Enhancing some of the ELPH 100's features, the PowerShot ELPH 300 is one of the best cameras you can get for $150 (comes to show you what bang-for-the-buck the ELPH 100 is). The ELPH 300 has the same dimensions of the ELPH 100 (roughly 19mm thick), it has a wider 24mm lens and a larger x5 zoom range. On top of that, it enables optical zoom while taking videos, which are recorded with stereo sound, as well. Its buttons are more comfortable to handle and so is its menu, with it various options.

Canon PowerShot ELPH 300

Best Ultra-Compact up to $200

Two new ultra-compacts share the title of 'best up to $200' - those are the Sony Cyber-shot WX50 and the Panasonic Lumix SZ7.

The WX50 is smaller and lighter than the SZ7, being 19mm thick and weighing just 117 grams, including a battery and a memory card. The SZ7, weighing 133 grams, 21mm thick body packs double the zoom range - x10 compared to x5.

Both cameras have a 25mm wide-angle lens, Full HD video with optical zoom and stereo sound, but the WX10 has a larger maximum aperture, for better support of low-light situations, as well as Sony's excellent sweep panorama feature.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC WX50

Panasonic Lumix DMC SZ7

Best Ultra-Compact up to $250

In this category, there's a battle between the already-proven-to-be-gold Sony Cyber-shot WX10 and the new, just-hit-the-market Cyber-shot WX150.

The WX10 is slightly larger, at 161 grams and just over 23 mm thick, with a 24mm lens and a x7 zoom range. It's largest aperture at the lens' wide-angle setting is f/2.4, which is much wider than average and provides good support for low-light situations, together with the camera's Back-Side Illuminated CMOS sensor.

The WX150 is smaller than the WX10, thinner by almost 2 mm and lighter by almost 20 grams and yet boasts a x10 zoom range. This comes at the cost of a smaller max aperture setting of f/3.3.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC WX10

Sony Cyber-shot DSC WX150

Best Ultra-Compact up to $300

Not necessarily better in terms of image quality or other features, the new Canon PowerShot ELPH 520 comes in at the price of $299. Its uniqueness is in its large zoom range - somehow cramping x12 worth of zoom into a body less than 20mm thick, making it the smallest x12 zoom camera.

If this rubs you the right way, by all means, get it, but bear in mind that the ELPH 520 uses a smaller than average imaging sensor, not much larger than that of the Iphone 4S. Read about it in this post: Largest and smallest sensors announced by Canon.

Canon PowerShot ELPH 520

-eyalg