Quality, looks, speed, size. It's a keeper.

When looking for a camera, I had the following criteria - Small enough for pocket but keeping good quality. I feel this camera meets my expectations.

Speed - I like how quick it can take a picture. Hit the power, then just snap the shot. No big wait for “boot up” like other digital cameras have.

Size - Being a typical male, I don't like to carry around anything in my hands, let alone a camera. This camera is perfect for a back pocket or inside jacket pocket. It's actually smaller than my wallet (and my wallet isn’t thick).
It’s really cool that you can zoom at good quality, and there’s not that huge ugly lens sticking out.

Quality – It says 5.0 Megapixels, which isn’t the top technology out there today, but man, the quality is just awesome. You can really zoom in on details to see things that you might not even want to see. You could probably take a picture to be developed as a huge 34x22 and still look great. Unless you’re a professional photographer, I don’t see you ever needing anything better than this.

Ease of use – I found this camera to be pretty simple to use. The only thing that I wanted to do that I had to look up in the manual was how to take a picture on the timer (hit the timer button, snap the button, run into view and try to look natural).

Features –
LCD – The screen on this camera is very large (2.5in)compared to other cameras and almost takes up the entire back of the camera. Pretty much “what you see is what you get”. If you can’t see an image on the screen clearly, the picture will turn out the same way (unless you use flash in the dark of course). Keep in mind that if you’re an “old school” user, you need to get used to there being NO VIEWFINDER, just the LCD screen.

Movie - I’ve had cameras before that can take movie files, but this is the first one that can zoom, then take movie. The down side is that you still can’t zoom WHILE taking a movie. The quality of the movie files are better than I’ve seen in the past, with good resolution and sharpness, but when moving ends up a little choppy. Don’t plan on taking movie clips without buying extra memory storage.

Memory card – My camera came with a 32MB Sony Duo Memory stick. It is physically smaller than a regular memory stick, but comes with an adapter so that you can still use it for items that only have a stick port (such as film development places or printers). It brings down the cost of cameras when producers supply a only low amount of memory in a package, I suggest buying at least a 256MB card, I went for 512MB (Make sure you get the DUO stick when looking!). Nothing is worse than running out of space on a card when you want to take more pictures. The card that comes with the camera can hold only about 20 high quality pictures at a time. I like that the camera visually shows you how much memory you have left on the display.

Docking Bay – I hear that some versions of this camera don’t come with a docking bay. I kind of like it when at home to dock, it stands the camera up nicely for display of the LCD side. The downside is that I have it hooked up with plug behind the computer desk. When I went on vacation, I wanted to bring the adapter in case I needed to charge the camera, so I had to dig behind the desk to get it. I may end up buying a 2nd power adapter.

Software – I could give 2 craps about what software comes with a camera, just as long as they give me drivers. I didn’t even install the software supplied, there’s no point in learning some new software that nobody else in the world uses, just use the picture editing software that you’re used to.
When connected to the computer, it creates a new drive called “memory stick”, and you can cut/paste pictures easily to your drive.

Battery – I feel that the battery lasts a good amount of time (about 2 hours). I’ve used the camera on several occasions and have filled up my memory space before the battery runs out. Just make sure you turn off the camera when you’re done taking a picture. I'm especially happy that there's a battery timer on the display to show how many minutes you have left.