opinion after a year and a half

I have owned this camera since fall 2005, and am really pleased with it. I have taken almost 16,000 photos, and it has done well. I can honestly recommend this camera so someone looking for more than just a point-and-shoot, but not quite SLR.

having used it extensively, I'll mention the places where this camera seems to need improvement. the first is the flash is limited. It's good for indoor portrait type shots, but is useless for really close or far away shots, and it is either too bright, or too dark. however, the large range of exposure settings allows for great shots even in really dark settings.

It also has a hard time focusing when using max zoom. I take a lot of airshow pictures, and it has a hard time focusing on the planes. the Manual focus isn't very helpful in this aspect since it is slow to use, and limited in it's effectiveness.

The final, and largest problem is that the lens mechanism jammed up. I've read this to be a fairly common problem for Canon. I got some sand in it about a year ago, but it managed to free itself, but recently it gave up the ghost and I'm looking at a fairly expensive repair, or possibly replacement since it's now out of warranty.

All in all, I would highly recommend this camera. I have gotten a lot of use out of it, and am overall pleased with the quality. If I don't upgrade to SLR, I'll probably get either this one, or the S3 IS (newest version) if I end up needing to replace it.