First off this is a top shelf camera, even now after having it for more than a year there are not many I would swap it for. That being said however, there are a few small issues, the manual and CD are harder to use than they should be and the 3" screen which is great makes for smaller buttons and controls in order to get the smaller form factor that the current camera user wants to have. If this is your first Camera and you have not used digital before you will be happy, if however you have used digital before you will find that the controls are not as intuitive as they could be especially as compared to other manufactures cameras. all in all this is a very fine camera and I'm happy with it

bought camera at Cosco on Maui and found it easy to use out of the box(didn't read manual). buttons smaller than most but pictures are great. memory and extra batteries are cheap and a must. great buy

This camera has many bells and whistles. Liked the many features like red eye deletion, cropping, and editing you could do right on the camera. The 3" LCD screen was big enough for my husband to see and great for sharing photos with others. I, with smaller fingers, could use the buttons and the wheel okay he had much trouble. We did not like the placement of the zoom button. Even with the "shaky hand" helper turned on I had trouble getting well focused pictures especially indoors. The CD's with the camera manual are a real pain to explore! The CD is a good idea but is very poorly organized. Trying to find a "how to" on one procedure I was referred to three additional pages. Also the Olympus photo program is not totally compatible with my new iMac G5. Finally gave up and did downloading straight to iPhoto. Memory is not sufficient (only10 or so high quality pictures could only be stored) and a memory card was a must buy. This was my first venture into the digital world. Took the camera back. But, I'm hooked on the digital and will look for another.

Upon opening my camera box I was blown away by the look of my Olympus! I have always been partial to Olympus, but admit the paled in the recent competition. They have a winner with this one in my opinion. I have been playing around with the controls and menus and do not find them hard to use, as others have said. It is a camera packed with neat features and the quality of the photos I shot were impecable. I still have alot of testing to do, but so far I am impressed!

This is a great camera but for one thing that I find terrible, the buttons and the 4 way rocker with the OK button in the middle are too small. I keep hitting the OK button when I want to use the rocker. This can be very frustrating trying to navigate and select the options. The zoom control would have been better placed on the rear like most other cameras as trying to operate this with your index finger is a bit cumbersome. Otherwise the images and the cameras use are superb. The 3 inch LCD is out of this world for previewing your images and taking the shot. Another thing that would have been nice is the ability to get finer resolution images. The JPG files are too compressed in my mind as my Nikon D70, also 6Mp has files almost twice the size of the SP-700 and you can see this on the final image if you zoom into it. For most people this will be adequate, but for me an update to the firmware in the future to resolve this would make this camera for me a huge hit. That said, I do like the size and features so worth buying if you are looking for a new camera with class.