Out of the box this camera produced beautiful results, despite being only 3-megapixels. It produced some fantastic images under our testing conditions and also in regular applications.
The camera body is quite large, but sports innovative features such as a top LCD display which updates you on your shooting mode, photo quality and the number of shots remaining in your current quality mode.
The 4x digital zoom in conjunction with focus stabilisation means even in 12x zoom mode you'll get sharp, well defined photos. The real kicker is the ability to record voice tags for each photo you take, capturing the spirit of the moment. The LCD is about average size at 1.6-inches, and has a fairly decent refresh rate. Menu layout and ease of use is exceptionally good, our only quibble was with the noise level of the unit when zooming.
At $599, it's well priced and offers a stack of features some of the more expensive cameras don't. Overall, it makes an excellent digital camera for day to day shots.