Having owned this camera since new for about the last three years I've come to know what this camera does best and also where it falls short in certain areas.

The camera is what is known as a bridge camera, basically it's inbetween a normal point and shoot affair and a digital SLR..... It contains all the features of the simple point and shoot and most of the features of the SLR (it does fall short of some important points which I'll try and explain later).


So what does it do and how good is it really?

Well as a point and shoot it is good, very very good in fact! Having taken it on several holidays and many day trips I can say that the long zoom of 12x makes it possible to take some pictures that other point and shoots would have no hope of doing, we took it to Disneyland Paris and I was able to take a nice shot of the castle but not only that a full frame full 6 megapixel image of a gold cherub sat on the very top, the other cameras we took could not even get close!

It has a "simple mode" which allows pretty much anybody to use it, everything is simplified including the menus. Anybody I've handed it to has been able to take nice pictures without me showing them how to use it which is a big plus point to me, my whole family can take pictures whenever they want and they don't have to learn how to use it.

The photo's are very nicely coloured, very sharp, and take very minimal processing to get some very decent prints, the largest of which I have done been an whopping A3.

It features antishake technology to allow you to use the full length of that gorgeous Leica lens meaning that even in cases of low light levels you can still get that picture, oh talking of low light levels, it has a focus assist lamp that is missing on a lot of lower models meaning it can still focus in pretty much darkness however unfortunately, having that long zoom does mean it isn't as good at taking low light pictures as some others, it just doesn't seem to let as much light in meaning it has to choose a higher ISO setting allowing more noise from the sensor into the picture.


So where does it fall short?
It can take photo's in a variety of different JPEG compressed formats allowing you to fit more onto a card, if you want to have an uncompressed shot you can choose TIFF which will avoid JPEG artifacts but it would have been nice to have a RAW mode allowing for exposure changes and so on when importing from the camera, this is the one thing I miss from my previous Canon G2.

The low light level picture taking.


Would I buy it again? For sure, I do miss the (albeit shorter zoom) lens and features that are missing from my previous bridge camera but the for features and quality this is a hard camera to beat at it's retail price point.