Excellent quality at twiice or three times the price.

Photo quality of the P880 is superb for the price, mostly due to good lens, I suspect. This is an excellent camera, particularly for the fine art photographer. FWIW, I'm quite demanding about image quality in the final print, having shot 4x5 and larger cameras for many years, taught photography at the college level, and studied Zone System with Minor White when he was still teaching at MIT. I'm now carrying the P880 as my regular camera when I anticipate that I may come across worthy subjects.

The 24 mm to 140 mm equivalent focal range is very nice and quite handy. It's particularly useful if you do a lot of indoor shots or landscapes. Because of the design and manual zoom lens, this is a nice camera for an experienced 35mm photographer transitioning to digital imaging. Focussing speed is decent if your firmware is version 1.02 out of the box or upgraded. Shot to shot times are OK in JPEG but pretty slow in RAW (18-20 seconds processing time), but then again, if you're shooting in RAW format, you're probably not all that concerned about shot to shot speed in any event. High speed SD cards make no difference. The Kodak and third party lithium ion batteries are very reliable and long-lived.

Carefully used, especially with RAW format files and post-processing, gallery quality 20x24 prints are feasible. In fact, it's hard to tell the difference between RAW format 20x24 prints from the P880 and those made with a scanned 4x5 negative. I know that this sounds like hyperbole but seems true even when I tested the hypothesis with several lay people. To get beyond my own anecdotal reactions, I checked the P880 against several dSLR cameras and the Canon A640 using Imaging Resource's Comparator and the P880 was sharper every time, even when compared to higher pixel count sensors and larger sensors. As a basic point and shoot camera for JPEG files and prints not larger than 8x10 or so, the P880 is handy and easy to use, even for a novice.

There are several caveats if you want to mark high quality big prints from the P880.

Upgrade to firmware version 1.02;

Try to use the camera in good light or with flash or fill flash, because the images get quite noisy when signicantly underexposed although this is not as much a problem with RAW format files;

Shoot RAW wherever possible - the P series cameras are directly supported by Adobe Camera RAW and the P series cameras have overly exuberant JPEG compression (there is no super-fine option) that degrades the use of RAW files for really big prints;

Use the exposure bracketing feature - it's easy to use and works even in RAW format, almost assuredly resulting in at least one good quality image.

Use the ISO 50 or ISO 100 settings and, if needed, a monopod. Image noise is very manageable at these ISO speeds but you may end up with camera shake when the light is low.

Read the manual: This is one camera that you need to understand in order to obtain good results facilely.

Don't expect this camera to be a speed demon - you'll get the picture quality but not the burst shooting speed of a dSLR, but then again, you are paying abou a third the price.

BTW: Your web site won't accept my real Email address of kashi@alaska.net It may be time to tweak your filters.