If you are just an amateur photographer that is either finally switching from analog to digital or just want a decent camera to take on family vacations or school projects, this is a great camera. It is small, lightweight, and does just about anything you could possibly need it to do. It won't take pictures of hummingbirds feeding across a forest bed, but it will take a decent photo of the grand canyon. The quality of the 3x optical zoom is really good, but the picture is sacrificed slightly as you try to artifically enhance it with the digital zoom. The battery life is good enough to take on extended trips from your hotel or on a hike without having to carry around a charger or spare batteries. If you plan on taking lots of high quality large photos, you will need to get a larger memory stick (64 MB will work, 128 MB even better), but the memory stick it comes with will be enough to photograph your child's birthday party as long as you download the photos onto your computer afterwards. At 4 MegaPixels, this camera will pick up individual hairs on a persons head and it will even be able to clearly define a flea in the hair. There are 5 MegaPixel cameras out there, but at the consumer level there is really no point in spending the money on one (5 MP won't come in handy unless you are student taking pictures through a microscope or a telescope) All around, while Sony's camera lenses may not compare with Canon or Olympus, Sony makes up for it with their superior knowledge of how to make a great consumer digital device and turn it into a decent digital camera. It is a great value for the price.

Although the camera is fine, the memory card format represents a fatal flaw that prospective buyers should consider. The memory cards are prone to format errors (Format Error 13-01) which can cause you to lose your photos. We have 8 memory sticks and have had problems with all but 3 of them. I recommend that any one considering a Sony camera purchase do a Google Search using search terms: Sony format error "13-01" to discover what disgruntled Sony owners are saying about this problem.

I had my camera about a year when it stopped charging fully. It is supposed to get 120mins on a full battery and only got 20. After trying two new batteries I called Sony to be advised that they would look at it for a cost of $180!!! It would have cost me around $200 with shipping! The only people allowed to service Sonys are Sony. You can't bring it someplace else. Kind of like a Volvo in that respect. Moral of the story, when buying a camera make sure it is something that your local camera store can fix.

This camera is top notch in many ways.
I gave it only 4 stars because of one thing: low-light shots.
Someone wrote that if you set the flash power manually to highest, it produces good low-light pictures. Unfortunately it's not true. I wish it would be. This camera is worse in low-light shots than the competition. Believe me.
It's your decision: if you can handle this, buy it, because otherwise it takes excellent pictures in normal lightning conditions. If low-light, night and indoor shots (with poor back-light) is important for you, look at the Canon S45 or S400 instead.

As a photo enthusiast with a number of photo workshops/classes and countless books on photography theory from landscape to portrait photography so I'm a very hard person to please when it comes to digital cameras. First I would like to mention that digital cameras are still a long way from matching quality of the better film cameras using 35mm slide film and no where near the potential quality of medium and large format cameras, so you need to take that into account and consider what you will be using it for. When I purchased this camera in June 2002 it was the cutting edge CyberShot. I immediately dumped the 16mb memory stick and picked up the largest available (and still to this day) 128mb Memory Stick as well as a couple extra lithium batteries. The great part is one of the batteries lasts right about as long as it takes to fill up a 128mb card!

The pictures are outstanding for a digital camera, the other thing that is really cool about it is you can capture mpeg format video with sound. Dont toss your video camera yet though, its dark light performance is hideous and resolution is not even close to a digital or tape video camera, but it is a neat feature when used under the right circumstances.

My biggest grip is Sony never came out with Memory Sticks larger than 128mb and doesn't appear to ever support it. They've produced a smaller MemoryStick version thats half the size but has an adapter to make it work but still none of larger capacity. I recently read on their web site that they are comming out with a total new format that isnt going to be compatable with any current MemoryStick device but will have capacities in the future exceeding 1 gigabyte.

At max resolution 2200x something, you can get 65 still pictures on a 128mb card. The pictures are in fact so good that you can stand 30 feet away from a soup can and snap a shot of the label, view the picture and zoom in to the point where you can read the ingredients. You can also set it down to 640x480 and get like 1500 pictures on to that same 128mb card so theres a lot of flexability depending on your needs.

Its a great camera if you need something compact and good enough to take pictures of things in every day life for instant digital gratification. If you dont plan to blow up prints the size of a poster you will have no problems with the resolution and find that the max setting is many times too much for your standard birthday party or trip to San Diego.