After wanting to throw my three Kodak's against the wall for ruining so many precious family moments, I did hours of research and settled on this camera. I am loving it! I've had it for about two weeks and highly enjoy playing with it. It's easy to use although it took me a time or two to get "speedy" with the changing of settings; I was used to the Kodak settings. I am adoring the color effect and vivid settings--two I wasn't sure I'd ever use. The scenery shots I have taken--especially in vivid--are stunning. The optical zoom during video make a very slight buzzing sound but if you have other noise going on in the video, you hardly notice it (if at all!) and it doesn't cut out the main audio you want to capture (unlike my Kodak optical that would totally override the desired audio with a loud cranking sound) I do advise you be careful when taking pictures of people. I had mine on auto today instead of portrait with face AiAF enabled and unfortunately it made the background trees crystal clear while blurring the people. It was a one time shot of a group of preschool children posing infront of a Redwood. I am very upset it did that but lesson learned: Take the extra second to put it on portrait; don't trust auto to always make people crystal clear. Otherwise my only other "complaint" is not being able to use two features at once such as fisheye in black and white or sepia. I'd love to be in a monotone setting and be able to use another setting with it. I really would have given this camera a 4 1/2 stars out of five if I could have. Four is not quite giving it the justice it deserves. *Reminder* invest in a good class 10 SD card for write time and storage space (there is no internal memory). Those 1080 videos take up a lot of room! (Sidenote--I have the rough black texture model--not the red one- and love it!)

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 229
This Camera is a Good Choice if You Want Something... Easy Enough for Anyone to Use