First Experience

I used to own the Canon S2 and I was extremely happy with my camera, just before the 'black screen of death' hit it. That being put out of commission, I used a sony compact point and shoot and hated every minute of it. I finally decided it was time to get off my ass and get myself something better.

My brother already owns a Nikon D40, so I decided on a bridge camera with a enough manual capability. I was torn between the Fuji s100fs (lil' too expensive and I couldn't find it anywhere) the Nikon P80, the Panasonic FZ28 and the Olympus 570UZ. Finally, after battling many internal demons (xD, crappy zoom ring, very few and iffy reviews, etc.) I did go and get the 570UZ.

Its a good camera by-and-large, and it has some cool features (lot of them gimmicky though). I'll just quickly go through the good and the bad of the camera:

Good:
> Nice set of features: 5-level Bracketing, time lapse, 20x zoom, decent wide angle, interesting panorama mode, etc.
> The zoom ring is not as bad as everyone says it is. I have the firmware update installed and it works pretty well.
> RAW
> Scene modes work really well
> Decent response time (I expected the worst because of xD)

Bad:
> Very poor AF, even in decent light. Almost impossible to use in low light.
> The manual focus is also bad beyond belief. You better hope that your AF can catch what you wanna catch, otherwise you're screwed.
> xD (only 2GB cards available as of now)

I'm getting the feeling that I might have made a mistake by not getting the P80 or the FZ28 but I guess now what's done is done and I'll make the best of my camera. It's not bad in most respects (apart from the AF focus hunting) and when I get to know more about it, I'll post a follow-up to this.

3 and a 1/2 Stars.