Fantastic entry into Digital photography

I bought this camera for my girlfriend to give her an entry into photography, but since we've had this little machine, it has supplanted all our other cameras, including my bag full of Nikons, a 2 megapixel Olympus with a 10x zoom, and even our Digital Video camera, which also takes stills.

It's incredibly easy to use. I'm an author, and I take this camera on book tour with me. I've handed it over to forty different people at forty different events and everyone, having never touched the camera before, they all delivered usable pictures.

The color is vibrant, and the resolution is good enough for nearly all uses. You can take shots that are sharp at full size on a 19 inch monitor, and I haven't found a need for more than that.

The lens is very sharp and the optical viewfinder is all you'll need unless you are doing close ups or other work that requires exact registration (when you can use the LCD finder). (Close ups of flowers come out amazing, both with flash and in natural light.) A 3x optical zoom is somewhat limiting, but pretty standard for a camera of this type, and perfect for people shots. (A longer zoom, while it sounds great, is very difficult to hand hold, and anything beyond 6x optical almost always requires a tripod, which sort of compromises your portablility, so unless you really need the magnification, don't spend the extra money. And digital zoom, as you probably know, is just a gimmick.)

The flash is good enough for most family snaps, but even with red-eye reduction on, you tend to get a lot of red eye. Be ready to fix this in the computer. (This may be that I forget to put the red-eye reduction on alot too.)

The shutter delay is a little long for action shots, but for most snapshots it's not a problem. There are ways to tweak the settings to improve this, but even at it's best you won't be catching the winning catch. I haven't found this to be a problem, but newer, more expensive camera designs have fixed this, so you should be aware of it.

Expect to spend a little money on accessories, but this is the case with almost any digital camera. First, get some NiMH Rechargable batteries and a charger. We found a great Panisonic kit from Costco for about $20. Two sets will get you through almost any situation. All digital cameras suck down batteries, so if this is your first exposure, expect that you'll kill a set of alkalines every fifteen minutes or so until you spring for the NiMH. (They last much, much longer, in addition to being rechargable.)

A 64MB flash card for about $30-$35 will help too. You'll have about 120 pics at full resolution. A case will run $12 to $20 and is recommended. (Just big enough to carry an extra set of batteries, the extra flash card, and give you a neck or shoulder strap, which the camera doesn't come with.)

A Sandisk Compact Flash USB card reader will run you about $15-$20 and is really convenient to have if you are moving a lot of pictures from the camera. With one of these, you can even save documents and other files to the compact flash cards as well.

The only fragile part is the battery door, so be very gentle with the camera when this is open.

Finally, the Canon software isn't great. I'd suggest using XPs or OXs built in software with a copy of Photoshop Elements to take out red eye. (The resolution reduction tool that you can download from Microsoft for free under XP powertools is a great little tool if you are going to send pictures by e-mail. It will downsize a bunch of your shots with one click. A hassle with the Canon software.)

This little camera has been a work horse that has brought home great pics from dozens of situations and for the money, it can't be beat. Despite what people try to sell you, the 1.3 megapixel resolution is great for almost all applications. If you've been using a point and shoot 35mm camera, you'll love this little guy.