I bought this cam in June 06 and have used it on a couple of vacations. The camera’s build quality is excellent. No cheap/flimsy/breakable battery covers etc. The camera is quite bulky, but light. A camera case is not included. I bought one at the local Burma Bazaar for INR150. Outdoor pics are brilliant and are very clear. The camera offers ISO sensitivity upto ISO800. However, I found that anything above ISO400 is very noisy and is unusable. Howver, you can reduce the noise in the picture by using the noise filter in photoshop - it makes a substantial difference. The flash is limited to around 11 ft. Indoor photos/low light photos are less than excellent, but satisfactory for most users. The 4x optical zoom is excellent. The zoom at the widest setting is 35mm which gives a wide field of view for group snaps and scenery shots. The digital zoom offered does not crop the photo like newer cameras, but uses software interpolation which degrades image quality. I have turned off digital zoom in the camera and use the crop photo function in photoshop instead. The LCD is somewhat small and grainy. It tends to wash out in bright sunlight and you might be forced to use the optical viewfinder in such situations. 1800Mah NiMH batteries lasted for around 150 shots with the LCD on. The main drawback is video. It can capture video only at 20fps in 320x240 mode and at 16fps in 640x480 mode. This makes the video somewhat jerky and unpleasant to view (Most other cameras offer 640x480 @ 30fps) In the camera’s manual mode, you can set the aperture and the shutter speed manually. However, for some crazy reason, canon has decided to provide only 2 aperture settings in manual mode! The light metering in manual mode kept giving me wrong readings, making it difficult to judge aperture and shutter speeds required. In short, the manual mode is unusable for anything. The camera also lacks aperture priority and shutter priority manual modes. Conclusion: If you can afford the additional INR2000, go in for the canon A540 which offers better video, LCD and manual controls. Some users have experienced problems with the zoom lens. Google for "e18 error". This is a problem which some people have faced with all canon ’A’ series cameras. I myself have not faced any such problems.