Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you're still using a point and shoot camera that's more than a few years old and you're tired of pushing the button and holding it down waiting forever for the damn thing to take a picture then this is a great next camera for you. Our old digital camera was fine for throwing in our pocket when we went on trips, but the shutter delay was so horrible that we'd miss fast paced moments or people would get tired of smiling as they hold a pose anxiously waiting for that flash. We had a few trips planned this summer and wanted an upgrade that would take clearer faster pictures generally for photo books and online viewing. I did TONS of research online and got all tangled up in megapixels and optical zoom and features that I probably would never use anyway. I'm not advanced enough to move up to a SLR camera, but I wanted something that was a step up from the camera I have now. After getting dizzy from all the online reviews I finally just went to some big box stores and played around with the cameras on display. I used them like I would use them on a trip and I even brought along my wife to make sure that she was comfortable using it. Based on the reviews I was all set to buy a Panasonic Lumix model, but there were too many dials and settings and it wasn't user friendly when actually holding and playing with the camera. I honestly hadn't even seen a review for this Sony WX150 camera, but it was so easy to use and was much smaller than some of the other "travel zoom" cameras. It has three basic modes that you could easily toggle with a button - camera, movie and panorama. Camera is where you spend most of your time and on here 95% of the time we live it on "auto". There are several scenes you can select if you want to optimize something for a specific setting. For example, if you're shooting through glass in low light you can set it to that it doesn't flash. If you're moving around a lot you can set it for extreme anti-blur where it takes like 5 pictures super fast and then puts them all together for a crisp image. Most importantly it's easy to toggle between the settings and you don't have to scroll through countless menu/info screens to find things. Panorama mode seems awesome when you read about it, but in practice it's been tough to get to actually work out well. The pictures always end up getting cut off pretty short. Maybe they'll look good on the computer when you blow them up, but on the camera screen it's a little disappointing. I haven't used movie mode yet so I can't speak to that feature. So this camera doesn't have GPS (which I think is just a battery drain) and it doesn't have wifi (another battery drain) but it has everything else you could probably want for the best of both worlds between point and shoot and travel zoom. Sure you can probably find more zoom or more megapixels, but if you play around with this camera I guarantee you'll appreciate how easy it is to use, how compact and lightweight it is, and how fast and clear it takes pictures.