Good for easy point-and-shoot

I took this camera to my 7-day Japan trip and here are my
observations. In summary, this is a very good camera for
most occasions.

Pros:

- The small & lightweight nature allows me to carry this camera
in my pocket throughout the entire trip
- The lag from switch-on to ready-to-use is short and enables
me to capture many scenes that could have been missed if I use
the older Optio 450
- The image stabilization is very helpful, especially for
those moving targets. There were cases it caught flying
eagles flawlessly.
- The auto face-recognition feature is also a big plus.

Through my trip I set the camera to IA mode most of the time,
combined with abovementioned features, this camera is not only
easy to use and is also extremely handy to capture whatever
scene comes to your eyes.

Cons: (Of course, being a sub-compact digital camera, it also
has its deficits)

- It has very limited manual control which makes it not so
good on special weather conditions.
- 3x optical zoom is  more

Cool looks, poor image quality

I picked up this camera to replace my wife's 3.1 MP Canon from 2003. As the camera will be strictly used as a point-and-shoot, I wanted to know how it performed straight out of the package. On an overcast day in summer with good and even light (2.00 p.m.) I took about 50 photos with it, first in full auto (auto fill-in flash, anti-shake and auto-ISO), later with ISO limited to 100 to reduce noise.

My first impression: All images suffer from visible noise and lack of detail. Even shots of static, high-contrast objects (30 yards away) were sometimes simply out of focus: At ISO 100, zoom set to wideangle and at 1/320s shutter speed you can rule out camera shake as a reason for blurry images - especially with the image stabilizer on.

As the camera appears to prefer high shutter speeds it will not stop down to give you better resolution of more depth-of-field. As a result, if it focuses on the wrong part of an image your main object might appear blurry. The Canon models I used recently (IXUS  more

Great DEAL!!!

Great Color accuracy, Amazing Intelligent Auto makes it almost impossible to get a shot out of focus (unlike my previous HP M417) and stabilization feature is unbeatable. You do not have to take pictures over and over again to get the shot you want. And the video mode is the best I've seen for a digital camera. I only paid 170.00 for this camera but I would have paid more if not given the option.