The perfect camera for a part-time photographer.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Slick steel design, tough, good picture quality, can film movies with sound.

Cons: Comes with very small memory card, flash produces stark pictures.

The Bottom Line: 
If you are no professional, but like taking pictures, I would buy this camera (and save a fortune in developing fees)

Author's Review
When I was 17, I got a camera (not digital) from my parents as a gift. I really got into taking pictures of everything, but one thing bugged me - I had to conserve my film, take pictures of things I knew were in focus, because it costs money to develop the film. What I wanted was a loose approach, taking pictures of any old thing that took my fancy, and not worry about it turning out well (not that I didn't want it to turn out well, but I wanted to experiment)
So I decided to buy a digital camera. I arrived at Fry's electronics, and wandered over to the camera section to browse, and I was quickly drawn to this little camera. What attracted me first was it's brushed steel case (I'm not a big fan of plastic) and as I played around with it, I found it was easy to use, and had a good amount of features, such as sepia tone, black and white, vivid, neutral, low sharpening, plus easy to use contrast adjustment, and 5 different light modes. It has a full color LCD screen viewfinder in the back which allows you to show your friends the pictures/movies you just took. It also can film movies (with sound!) at 3 resolutions, although when you use the highest one (640x480) you can only film for about 3-4 seconds in full color, but on the medium setting (320x240) you can get anywhere from 12-25 seconds. I actually filmed a movie with my friends using this camera, and surprisingly I found it to be better quality than my high 8 camera!
One problem with it is the tiny, tiny 8 meg card the camera comes with - this can only hold perhaps 20 pictures, and filming is pretty hard. I would strongly suggest getting the 128 meg card, as it goes for only $50-60 dollars at circut city.
The picture quality is great, as long as it has enough light. Without enough light, the pictures get grainy and colors start to wash a bit. The built-in flash is good for certain situations, but I found that you get much better color if you can find another light source, as the flash usually produces starkly bright images. I use this camera with my flat-screen iMac, and it was easy to set up, in fact if you have OS X running and the Image Capture app, you don't need any other software to download pictures.
The battery system is a breeze, the camera comes with a charger that has no cord, you just plug in straight into the wall and slip the battery in, and about 1 hour its fully charged. I can run the camera for about 1.5 hours on a charge, and in a pinch, you can charge the battery for 5 minutes and squeeze a few pictures in before it dies again.
Overall, this camera will serve you well. I have had mine for about a year and a half, and have had absolutely no problems with it, and the steel case has kept it looking perfectly new.