“From a technical viewpoint, the Canon SX10 IS finds itself on a high level. The camera does prove itself and delivers sharp pictures with natural colors, all of which with extensive users ease. The dynamic range is of an excellent level and delivers pictures that also show a lot of detail even in full contrast situations. The large optical zoom range of the 20x zoom is nice to work with in practice. No tripod is needed to capture sharp images at a large distance, thanks to the effective optical image stabilization. Hardly any distortion, if even any at all, is visible which is a joy for the final result is.”

Labs beta: As revealed last Thursday (our tenth anniversary) today we are flicking the switch on our latest (and potentially biggest) new site feature. Our Challenges system provides a mechanism by which photographic challenges can be both created and entered by any member of our community. The initial beta has a few limitations (see inside for details). That said we're excited to make this new feature available today and hope you will enjoy testing it, we would actively encourage feedback using the special link available at the bottom of all challenges pages.

Labs beta: As part of our ten years celebration we've been working hard to bring you a beta of our next big site feature; Challenges. Anyone who has been on the dpreview forums will be more than aware of the popularity of photographic challenges. Until now these have been created primarily by a single challenge host creating a new thread in the forums to promote their challenge idea and others following up with entries. We decided to take this concept and develop a fully integrated challenge system for dpreview which will allow series of challenges to run, with a flexible range of rule sets, voting options and winner concepts. The public beta of our Challenges system will begin this coming Monday 29th December with the opening of five initial challenges created by ourselves which any registered dpreview member can enter. After this we'll be looking for challenge hosts to continue the next phase of the beta.

The entire team at dpreview would like to wish all our readers a very Happy Holidays (whichever you're observing). As always Christmas Day marks another anniversary for the site, this time it's a big one, ten years. To celebrate we have opened our new labs section as well as revealing our first public beta feature; Challenges. As a bit of a retrospective on the last ten years we've also produced two short blog entries looking back and taking stock. Whatever you're doing today, enjoy yourselves and thank you for being a part of dpreview.com!

Just posted! The fourth (and penultimate) installment of our compact camera roundup looks at the top-end cameras aimed at the experienced photographer. These enthusiast cameras offer a bit more flexibility than the cameras we've looked at so far, whether that's the inclusion of a large zoom range or a greater degree of manual control. Follow the link to find what we made of them.