A compact camera with grown up features comparable to a digital SLR! PASM modes makes it useful for the enthusiast who doesnt want to take the bulky SLR on a family trip or an evening party, but still want to be creative.
Camera has a quick start up time which comes in handy when you dont want to miss that quick opportunity. The detail and colour saturation of the pictures is excellent. The colour reproduction is very natural too! They are razor sharp and with the apperture priority mode, you can be creative and do some low depth of field pictures too!
There is exposure compensation too which comes in handy in difficult lighting conditions.
The support for SD HC cards makes it convenient a you has store the massive 12 MP pictures on to high capacity cards.
Night(low light) shots: I love the shutter priority mide for night landscapes and fireworks, it works a treat.
And the flash does a very good job too giving even lighting in most occassions.(except in the most wide settings). And the hot shoe can take dediacted Nikon flash guns as well, that is if you are a’Nikonian’!
Low light pictures without flash can sometiems show up as grains due to image compression into .jpegs.
Nikon provides some image manipulation software, but I hardly use this. I find MS Office picture manger very handy for doing basic stuff like changing contrast and brightness.