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There is a firmware upgrade for the carema which fixes ALL of these problems.

I've had this camera now for over a year and it is awesome. First of all to the people complaining about the battery life, you must have a faulty unit because my batteries last forever. I am always taking pictures and very rarely have to change batteries. I spent 4 days in Vegas and the Grand Canyon last year and took over 600 pictures and never even had to replace the batteries and that was also with constantly looking at the pictures on the screen and downloading them to my laptop without using a power adaptor. The pictures I have taken are awesome but you need to take the time to learn the camera options. For example you need to learn when to use the flash or change the shutter speed to get good shots. Its not complicated but most people don't bother to do this and then complain about poor pictures. Its your own fault. I even had a professional photographist complement pictures I have taken with this camera. The zoom is awesome. I have taken pictures of things over 1500 feet away and they look crystal clear. If you take your time and learn to use the many features of the camera you will be extremely happy with the results.

This camera when it works takes spectacular photographs. Superior quality. However, this camera's reliability in terms of operation is awful. It burns through batteries as if they were candy. I always have had to have extra batteries on hand. More significantly, the camera refuses to turn on at times (even with fresh batteries). It also refuses to retract its lenses when turned off sometimes as well. I am completely frustrated with this camera. It now refuses to work at all despite seemingly operating correctly. The quality of this product surprised me given my previous complete satisfaction with other HP products.

This is my first digital camera. I've had the camera for approximately 8 months. I have used it on two vacations and for family photo opportunities. So far I am very pleased with the camera and it's many functions. I could go on about all the good things but you, reading this, expect those things.
I have four things that I am having trouble adapting to after using a 35mm film camera for years.
1 - The screen going black and the delay in the shutter action really makes it difficult or almost impossible to take action shots. Even taking a standing animal or bird becomes hard because they move unpredictably. You can anticipate, and I'm getting better at that, but to visually follow a subject and take action pictures is impossible.
2 - The lense is super untill you get to the digital only point and then things get grainy. I now never use the digital section of the lense.
3 - It would really be nice to be able to manually focus. You can't.
4 - I would really like to put a polarizing lense on the camera but this is not easy to do and keep the "camera off" dimensions of the camera. Maybe HP has an adapter that will allow me to do this but "Camera World" in Portland did not know of any.

I purchased this item in 2003 and, at the time, it was an excellent camera. It has lasted almost three years since without any issues. It works well, the images produced are suitable and the zoom feature is really nicely implemented. The camera offers a nice shot speed and, at one time, the number of accessories available was quite high. In that time, I purchased close-up, zoom and telephoto lenses that all worked as well as could be expected.

In the intervening period since I acquired it, other, cheaper units have exceeded the quality of the camera and come in much slicker, less clunky packages. I recently acquired a Nikon Coolpix 4600 that has the same megapixel resolution and was about half the price and about half the size. All in all a good camera but the technology is moving pretty quickly and this camera suffered from those advances. Additionally, the software provided with the camera is a little unwieldy and other third party packages, including Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 are more appropriate.