I bought this camera for the Edinburgh Festival to just slip it in my pocket and shoot the mood and feel of the festival esp. the street artists, crowd and the surroundings. My budget range was a very modest sub £100 excluding the accessories. I evaluated all the famous brands - Canon, Nikon and Fuji and by chance headed to Jessops to have a look at the ones on top of my evaluated list. There the salesman showed me this beautiful slim piece in jet black and I loved the look and feel of it from the start.

I have taken quite a lot pictures - around 500+ and around 100+ movies and my first impressions is its amazingly good picture quality. The battery is rechargeable Li ion with the charger coming free which means that my running costs on this camera is rather low with no AA batteries to buy. On the downside, I do have to remember to pack the charger if I am going out of station.

It also has many intelligent features - Auto Focus tracking, image stabilizer, flesh tone recognition etc. to make life easier for a point and shoot person.

The best thing is that it has the very good Leica lens - for that perfect picture quality. You though need to buy an SD card since the built in memory can hold 14 pictures at best.

As for the product features, here is a quick, commented run down -Resolution - 14.1 megapixels - you can get upto A3 size print outs with very good resolution though anything above 10 is sufficient for taking non-professional pictures

Optical and digital zoom 4 - and along with a high quality Leica lens and image stabilizer is again good enough to take landscapes as well as distant pictures the video with sound can be also easily played back on the camer the menu and buttons are intuitive and very easy to use - though without a viewfinder it might be a little difficult to view things on LCD screen under blazing sun

Overall, a good compact camera that takes good quality pictures and has features far beyond money could buy for anything that is below £100.

Also reviewed for Ciao UK under same name and title