Nice beginner camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: -Great Macro shots
-very durable
-easy navigation

Cons: -eats alkaline batteries
-not optical lens
-lots of noise

The Bottom Line: 
Handy little camera, not for professional use, though.

Author's Review
It's a great little camera for a beginner, but the quality was a little worse than expected. I did care about quality, because I almost always took macro or landscape shots. The strange thing is, that the macro shots are high-quality, while the landscape or portrait shots have more noise. I've taken many shots with this camera, and I am satisfied. If you set it to take pictures at highest quality and 1600x1200 resolution, you can resize it to 800x600 or 640x480, and the shots look amazingly crisp and clear. Like they were taken from a professional camera. It has 2x Digital Zoom, but I wish it had an optical lens, so there would be optical zoom.

The design is very nice and tough. I have dropped it onto rock-hard asphalt 4 times, and it is still in great condition. It has easy menu navigation, but its too bad that you can't set the loading background. (although thats almost useless, but still a fun tool ;) )

It eats your battery like crazy, though. Don't use alkaline, go with NiMH rechargeable batteries. This camera likes alkaline, like the chinese love to eat chicken. I get around 1.5-2.5 hours of use with rechargeable RAYOVAC or Powerizer NiMH batteries. Make sure to buy a pouch to carry the camera and batteries, you're gonna need it.

Overall, it's a great beginners camera. I would recommend it to anyone on a budget, looking for a nice camera.