Terrific camera, great value
Pros:
easy to use, great battery life, reasonably compact
Cons:
not as versatile as an SLR
The Bottom Line:
great camera for the enthusiast at a great price.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
This camera does everything it's intended to do, and it does it well. It's a sort of compromise between the tiny point and shoot models that fit in your pocket, and the full blown SLRs, and I've found that's a really sweet spot to be as far as value goes. It lets you adjust the focus manually, you can adjust aperture priority, shutter priority, manual exposure, close-up shots, timed-exposures, and time delay shot within ten minutes of opening up the box. For me, that's good, because it means I can recall with ease just how to do all of those things even if I go a month or two without using the camera.
I've been hugely impressed by both the battery life. Recording videos and using the flash eats up the battery faster, of course, but even so, I'll typically eat up 1-2gigs of memory on my flash card before I'll run a battery down. The downside to the battery system is that it is a proprietary system, so if the battery does somehow fail, get lost, or fail you in any other way on a trip, you aren't likely to find a replacement until you return home or find a chance to order something online. It's not something you'd find in the battery section of any normal big box stores.
The body of the camera itself is well put together, and light weight. It also features a threaded hole on the bottom so you can mount it on a stand. That's more important than you might imagine if you're coming from a lesser point-and-shoot, because at 10 or 12x zoom, you'll need some way to steady the camera, particularly in low light conditions. Also, the camera will accept lens filters, like polarizing filters and such, which is a nice feature.
One quirk I have run into is that the camera will throw an error about not being able to read the memory card. I re-insert it, and the error goes away and everything works fine. This may be the card and not the camera, though.
Having used both lower-end point and shoots and SLRs before, I have to say I'm extremely pleased with this compromise. Yes, it takes up a bit more space than a tiny 2x point and shoot, but it also gives you about 80-85% of the capabilities of an SLR, at 1/10 the price. For most of my photo taking purposes, this is just fine.
