Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't typically bother reviewing products because I usually only buy things that already have a lot of reviews. I decided to throw in my 2 cents on this one in hopes someone can benefit from my experience. I primarily use my camera for family shots, mostly of my young children. I loved my old Canon A610 more that I can say and it has served me well for 4 years. Recently one of my children got a hold of it and bent up the little dealies that close over the lens cap to the point where I had to pull them off with tweezers just to use the camera. That's when I decided it was time to see what Canon now has to offer. I am by no means a photography expert. I just want a point and shoot that I can use to snap high quality family photos for prints, digital scrapbooks, etc. The sale price on this camera seemed excellent for the features and a free memory card offer sucked me in so I took the plunge. I assumed it would be a major upgrade from my 5MP A610. Once I had the battery charged up I started taking photos of my kids in auto mode. I was *shocked* at the poor quality of the photos. Every photo I reviewed was terrible. Many were blurry, and the ones that weren't couldn't be cropped to the slightest degree without losing all detail. I couldn't believe it! Auto mode on my old Canon had never failed me before and I could crop all the way to the eyeballs without loss of detail. Determined not to give up, I did some research. Several people recommended "kids and pets" mode. I tried this and the blurry issue was solved. However, the cropping issue still remained. I dug deeper and started messing with ISO settings and a bunch of other stuff I don't really understand. I just couldn't solve the problem. I even got out my old Canon and took identical shots with both cameras and the old one won out every single time. I must point out that these were all indoor shots with relatively low light. I realize these are not ideal conditions, but if a camera can't handle those conditions then it isn't for me. I had pretty much resolved to return this camera and was already shopping on Amazon for another one when I decided to give it one more try. I simply couldn't understand how this camera could perform so poorly. I fired it back up in "kids and pets" mode and started looking around at all the settings it would let me modify. That's when I noticed an "S" in the bottom left corner of the screen. Hmmm...what could this be? The other options for this setting are L M1 M2 M3 S and W. It turns out that this setting determines the number of megapixels that the camera uses. L is the highest resolution setting which uses all 10MP and 3648x2736 resolution. S (which is what the camera was automatically set to) has a resolution of only 640x480 and appears to use .3MP. Soooo, I bumped it from S up to L and now my camera takes awesome photos. Once again I can crop to the eyeballs and now side by side the same photos look even better on the new camera than they did on my old one. Also, with my 4GB memory card it says I can take approximately 1450 photos at this higher resolution. So now all is right with the world, I don't have to deal with the hassle of a return, and I can take awesome family photos this Christmas. Even though the camera is performing admirably now, I had to give it 4 stars because it should not have been such a pain in the rear to straighten this out. Not to mention that the included paper manual does not even address this issue at all. I assume the online manual covers it, but should I really have to go that far to get one croppable indoor shot? This is a point and shoot!! Most of the bad reviews were for the same problem I was having. The majority of purchasers don't want to have to switch a bunch of settings; they just want the camera to take great photos without a lot of effort.