"Beck" wrote in message ...
To me, a point and shoot camera has always been of the small pocketable
type that have barely any manual controls and maybe a few set scenes.

SLR would be a camera type (apart from being single lens reflex) that has
full manual controls aswell as auto.

I am curious as to what the middle cameras would be? You know like for
example the Fuji S5500 that has a full range of manual controls but is not
an SLR. Would that still be classed as a point and shoot camera?

There is no real reason I need to know this, its just merely out of
curiousity because in my experience the media tend to talk about either
point and shoot or slr cameras.

The gap between the two gets smaller every year. E.g. Sony's R1
released last November has a huge SLR-type CMOS sensor, but is
a fixed lens P&S (although no movie mode, a feature found on virtually
all P&S cameras today).

The distinction between SLR's and P&S's is evolving more into a
difference of image quality rather than a difference of lens type or
features. Manufacturers are concentrating on stuffing more and more
MP onto smaller and smaller sensors in P&S cameras, a trend that's
both unfortunate and entirely unnecessary. So if you can live with
relatively mediocre image quality, cameras such as the Canon S2 IS
(soon to be S3 IS), Fuji's S5500Z etc have some pretty incredible
feature sets.