I bought this camera primarily for holidays and events with family. I needed a fully digital solution with data to be saved on SD cards, fairly high resolution, pocketable, and inexpensive. This camera fits the bill in all these respects and has become a regular companion on walks and outings.

So what are the primary pros and cons?

On the pro side - I love the small size and light weight, high resolution (720p) video, reasonable optical zoom (5x) and amazing macro capabilities. It takes very good still photos in good light with vibrant colours and a reasonable flash. It has quick start-up - almost instant if you use the sleep mode while you are out and about. It stores video in ISO standard mp4 format with a pretty high bitrate - so no issues with compression artifacts, and you get a lot of video on a 4gb or 8gb SD card.

On the con side - low light performance is an issue - in fact this is a very common problem with camers of this kind - solved only when you move up to seriously more expensive gear. The video can be low in colour saturation and contrast - this can be solved by manually selecting settings which boost appropriately (coudy and vibrant settings), or this can be tweaked at production time). Still images can show noticeable barrel distortion.

Being light weight, it is important to keep the camera very still whilst shooting video otherwise camera shake can be a real issue. The image stabilistion is fairly competant, but it important to tur this back off when it is not needed - it can make you feel queezy if it is left turned on whilst shooting the wrong kind of footage - panning for example.

The bundled software is reasonable - but I would have loved to have got my hands on a decent video editor capable of *saving* in ISO standard mp4 format (H.264 and AAC) - Premiere Elements can certainly import it and makes the production of DVDs a breeze, but this is no good to me as I want to save my edited footage as finished H.264 video files for archiving and playback on my Media PC etc. See general discussion on this camera for my solution to this issue.

The macro capability of the lens system is quite mind boggling. Almost microscopic photos can be obtained with ease - I now have many close up honey bee on flower photos with artistic blurry backgrounds in my collection!

Overall, I am a very happy bunny and would recommend this camera to anyone with similar needs to mine. Take a "proper" camera for low-light photography, or spend a lot more for a video camera with better low light capabilities if this is what you need, but in most other cases this gadget will satisfy.