Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

From my personal experience in the last 2 weeks since I received Sony's HX9V camera: Overall I am happy with my purchase and consider that Sony's camera is competitive compared with similar offerings available from other manufacturers (see below). Pros - Wide angle lens and optical zoom (16x) are great: 24mm to 384mm in 35mm film equivalent - Excellent clear display (3", 921k) - Great panoramic mode - you sweep the camera around in one motion and it makes a single photo. You can sweep up and down too if the focal length doesn't change too much. - Generally good photo quality for a pocket megazoom camera. - Can easily fit in a jacket pocket or squeeze in a trouser one (camera is 4.2 x 1.4 x 2.4 inches ; 8.6 ounces) - Video stabilizer is exceptionally good and quality is decent too - GPS records your location - Reasonably quick start-up for photo shooting - about 1 second - Works fine with the 16 GB SDHC Class 10 card I have (I believe Class 6 works fine too) - Auto backlight correction helps to get details with difficult lighting - Background defocus mode can produce some dramatic results. - Reasonable battery life - about 240 photos and some short videos. Cons - Slow to change between photo modes or video/photo mode - about 7 seconds - you may miss the moment! - Colors can appear too saturated on the display - Colors can also be a bit saturated on the photos, but using 'P' mode and 'natural' colors helps. Also, reducing color saturation in the 'P' mode can help reduce yellow color in low light. - Photo review zoom in is slow to get going. - GPS can be a bit slow to find you and it only gives lat/long info, not location name as some other GPS camera systems do. - Flash can be a bit bright leading to overexposure if objects are close with a dark background. (also happened with my last 2 point and shoot digital cameras by other manufacturers). Slow sync flash can help, but camera needs to be held very steady to avoid blurring. - Video start button is a bit small but works ok when you get used to it. - Pop up flash can be annoying. You have to remember to hold the camera differently to avoid having your finger on top of it. Also, whenever you ask someone else to take an indoor photo, you have to warn them about the flash and how to hold the camera. - Video is great but eats up your memory card! High quality fills 16 GB in less than 1 hr. Might be worth getting a second 16 GB card or a larger card if you plan to do much video in the high quality setting. From reading reviews, alternatives compact ultra-zoom cameras I considered buying were: - Canon PowerShot SX230 HS - high photo quality, 14x optical zoom, 3" 460k display, more manual controls, but it also has a pop-up flash, is a bit slow start on start-up and has a short battery life. Wide angle lens is 28mm equivalent, so not as wide as the HX9V's 24mm. - Ricoh CX3 - High photo quality (not over-saturated tendencies like Sony, nor grainy tendencies like Panasonic), excellent macro mode, 10.7x optical zoom, 3" 920k display, 10 megapixel, but no manual controls and cannot zoom beyond 2.8x during filming. - Panasonic ZS10 (or TZ20) - 16x optical zoom, 24mm equivalent wide-angle, quick start-up, 3" 460k display, GPS gives name of location, flash is not pop-up (good), but photo quality is average, battery life is not so good and worse with GPS on, the touch screen only does some functions while other have to be done with buttons in a strange mixture.