excellent to a fault.

The quality of picture you can eek out of this camera given its specs is ridiculous. However, it is terribly apparent that the one problem with the camera is that the details pertaining to picture quality and storage are given attention, but other major considerations such as contruction are not. The reason i did not give this camera a 5 star rating is because i have had numerous problems that i would never been able to figure out with out prior technical know-how.

examples:

The battery won't hold a charge: As with all batteries, the best thing to do to ensure a long battery life is to drain it completely and charge it back up. Repeating this process will avoid the problem of "battery memory" which means that the battery will act as if completely drained when in reality it has is only 50% drained. Draining it completely and then filling it up actually produces a "battery memory" effect, but one such that the battery will behave as it should for as long as possible. All batteries will die eventually, th ats just high school physics.

The memory card constantly has an error:
This happened to mine, as i suspect it has to many other after market memory cards. The problem is that the door covering the access to the battery and the memory card does not sufficiently hold the card into the slot and onto the contacts. My solution was to put a strip of adhesive foam (about 1/16) of an inch thick along where the bottom of the memory card comes into contact with the access door. This effectively solved my "no card" "card error" and "error 5" messages, and kept me from losing images.

As for those people who are unhappy with the results of the camera, i would say that any camera with an auto mode will have its inherent limitations, and indoors is a nightmare for any computer controlled camera. I would encourage them to learn the inner workings of the camera and use the manual mode, rather than just the camera a bad review. This is the exact reason this camera has a manual mode. Sure auto is easy, but the best pictures always come from someone who knows light and cameras (which consequently are not that hard or technical to understand).

In short, this camera gets a 3 star rating for having 5 star glass and 5.25 megapixels with a great analog zoom (who on earth uses digital zoom?) at an extremely affordable price. You ultimately get what you paid for, which in my case appears to be a hurried, shoddy and un-inspected construction. I would buy an SLR were i a photographer, but this camera will serve anyone else perposes more than well.