As straightforward upgrade to the Optio T-10, the Optio T-20 retains all the innovative features of its predecessor and adds a 7-megapixel sensor with 800 ISO support.

It’s a camera that’s crammed full of extras, although you’d never guess this from its appearance alone. It has only five control switches – including the power button and the shutter release. There are no cursor keys or navigation buttons - a menu button, zoom dial and playback switch make up the full complement.

The key to operating the T-20 lies in its huge 3in LCD screen, which takes up nearly the whole of the back of the camera. By using a touchscreen system the camera makes the buttons you need magically appear as and when you need them – nice and big, and all lit up. It’s also very fast - holding it like a gamepad, you can tap away with your thumbs - flying in and out of menus in no time without missing a shot.

There are essentially two menus - the main menu which pops up when you press the menu button and a shooting menu that pops up if you tap the screen while composing your shot. From here, you can quickly adjust settings such flash, focus, metering and ISO modes just as quickly as if individual control buttons were provided.

There are no manual controls, but the very large selection of shooting modes covers a wide range of situations and provides plenty of creative control. Each shooting mode is accompanied by an example picture and a paragraph of explanatory text, making it easy for novice users to get to grips with the camera’s capabilities without resorting to the manual.

While flexibility is generally a good thing, some of the Option T-20’s features go just that little bit too far. For example, having a mode for photographing ‘pets in motion’ is fine, but asking the user to select form six different dogs and cats of varying colours is a little much.

In playback mode, the same touch menu system lets you edit your pictures and movies in a variety of ways including many effects and filters. Here, the use of the touchscreen with the supplied stylus comes into its own – you can crop, resize and even annotate your images in an environment rather like a simple PC-based image-editing program.

Image quality is good, with natural-looking colours and pleasing levels of detail from such a physically small lens. Build quality is excellent. Constructed from a shiny aluminium alloy with rounded edges, it’s both sturdy and stylish while thin enough to be easily pocketable.

The Optio T-20 lacks image stabilisation, but the new ISO-800 produces usable results and while it’s not much of a step up from the Option T-10, it costs considerably less than the T-10 did when we reviewed it – making it a much better value proposition.

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Samsung NV10 digital camera
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Fujifilm Finepix F30 digital camera
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