Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This will be a long review, read it through if you are considering buying this camera. As that dumb old song says, "You take the good, you take the bad..." I took this camera on safari in South Africa. I didn't want to have to continually change lenses, plus my long lens broke on a trip to Spain last year and I was going to have to pay some big $$ to replace it. So I opted to buy the P900 instead. This was my first point-and-shoot style camera. I have always shot Canon digital SLRs with a selection of lenses. I consider myself a semi-pro; I've worked in a portrait studio, shot a few weddings for friends, and had a few photos published in magazines. I do NOT make a living at it, just a hobby There are a number of pros and cons with the camera. Everyone has different expectations and things they think are important, so weigh the pros and cons presented below and decide if the camera is for you. The price was certainly good for what you got! PROS - you can shoot close-up photos from an amazing distance, above all else, this is the camera's main positive feature. I have lots of things to complain about with the camera, but in the end I come back to the close-ups. I got crystal clear photos of a cheetah's whiskers, a crocodile's tooth, an elephant's eyelashes, and a baby penguin's toes - all hand-held from a safe distance! Changing settings is pretty easy once you get familiar with where things are on the dial. The grip is good and the camera is light-weight considering all that it does. Once I figured out how to use the close-up function, it did an incredible job of shooting tiny bugs and flowers with startling clarity. The GPS function was amazing! It's just magic that it knows where you are by specific name... in fact we were in a huge botanical garden and it knew which specific area of the garden we were in. Amazing. Sometimes when we were driving and didn't know where we were, I'd just look at the camera! CONS - There is a long delay for the shutter trip, frustratingly long. The recovery time between photos is long and frustrating - in fairness, I was shooting at maximum resolution. It is a bit faster if you shoot at lower resolutions. Using the specialized shooting modes takes even more time (back lighting, sports mode, bracketing, etc.) I bought a high-speed card and that helped, but even that was slower than my older model Canon EOS. The light meter/color balance was remarkably inconsistent. Two photos of a rhino at the watering hole taken seconds apart and in the same exact pose and lighting - one was a sickly blue cast and the other was a nice warm sepia (how it appeared to the naked eye). The meter does not handle extreme lighting conditions well at all - either low light or bright light. Sunsets blew out the lens, though using a polarizer filter helped a little. Low light or a cloudy overcast day confused the color balance or forced slow shutter speeds. Eventually I found that I could trick the meter by selecting what at first appeared to be inappropriate scene choices (using Sunset setting on a cloudy day gave me a truer color rendition in a lush green garden setting than the camera's automatic setting did.) The LCD screen and zooming the lens sucks the battery dry in short order. You MUST buy extra batteries and carry them with you. The battery indicator shows full until moments before it shows partial and then it's dead - you don't get a lot of warning! The LOOOOONG telephoto lens is motor driven only - you can't do it by hand (which took some getting used to!) it took a lot of battery juice to drive that lens in and out. I was frustrated by the fact the picture you just took only stays on the view screen for a quick second and you can't adjust that. If you looked through the eyepiece to take the shot, that's where the view displays. So if you shoot through the EVF and pull it away to see the shot (a long-held habit of mine) you see nothing, it doesn't show on the LCD screen. This seems like some decisions were made about the camera's functions that didn't take into account how people would use it. I shot twice as many pictures as I needed because I rarely knew what I had just shot. It was hard to keep switching back and forth from shooting mode to viewing mode and if you were in viewing mode when a great shot was at hand, it took a while to get the camera back to shooting mode... missed a few really great shots that way. Finally, I struggled to convince the camera that I didn't want to focus on the leaf that was in front of the family of baboons playing on the hillside. It didn't seem to matter which of the metering/focusing modes I was in, I got a lot of crystal clear shots of a leaf with a wild animal out of focus in the background. ERRRGGGHHH. In the end, the photos that were good were FABULOUS - though I deleted at least 80% of my shots! Other people on the safari spent the trip looking over my shoulder at my LCD screen ohhhing and ahhhing over some of the pictures I captured. When the light meter and color balance were working, it captured the colors of the markets with incredible accuracy. And as long as the animals were standing still or moving slowly, it captured some amazing wildlife shots as well. But if they were moving quickly, I got nothing useable - the camera just couldn't handle it. It has a wi-fi transfer function, but my Android phone and the camera just couldn't seem to talk to each other to make the transfer and even on the rare occasion when we got that to work, it took a ridiculous amount of time. I eventually just bought a card reader and cable transferred my files to a laptop every evening as a back up. The flash is relatively worthless, and there is no hot shoe to run an external flash, so you really are dependent on ambient light for whatever you want to shoot. OVERALL - I'm keeping the camera and learning to live with its shortcomings, but I will take my Canon with me when I travel as well.