New camera came today 
Bullet points:
- the reviews I read mentioned poor autofocus in low light conditions. This is worse than I expected, low light seems to mean indoor, it's about 50-50 whether the autofocus will mess up and give you a blurry picture. All is not lost as the camera does have manual focusing but it would be nice not to need it so much. This is the main problem with the camera.
- flash is very powerful: lights the room, yet catches skin tones and does not make subject look pale
- Zoom does not really magnify, it's not like a telescope zoom even if it is 10x optical.
- came with batteries which lasted about two hours playtime. May be because I was running it with both the LCD and Electronic Viewfinder running at the same time, showing the same picture.
- lots of buttons dotted around means a lot can be done without using menus: e.g. manual focus button under 2nd finger left hand. Quicker to set things up than my old Nikon.
- supplied software for pc is unimpressive assortment of utilities. Dialogs display with gross text positioning errors, you select an option from a menu and things appear to freeze while an application slowly launches another application, the utility I found to download pictures does not seem to let you pick which you want to download or here to put them.
- can change shutter sounds etc to silly birds tweets, boing noises and the like.
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nice pictures (when they are in focus):
Verdict: I am happy with it so far.
Peter's Moblog
