Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have come to the conclusion that most of the reviewers of this camera do not own any other cameras with which to make a competent and accurate comparison! Unless you are looking at a review from a professional site that does nothing but camera reviews, most consumer reviews have to be taken with a grain of salt! You have to keep in mind that for a review to have meaning, you must know what camera(s) the consumer is comparing the A3000 to and if the photos are being taken under similar conditions. Comparing the A3000 to a 6MP Canon is useless and so is comparing photos that are shot under different lighting conditions or using different ISO settings or different lenses (zoom versus wide angle). I am not going to go into all of the details as to which camera has what features since my primary concern is picture quality followed by video quality. Features are great but would rather have fewer features but better photos and videos! I took all four cameras, put them on a tripod and shot photos using the standard 18-55mm kit lens that came bundled with the camera. I took photos of a house on the side of a hill that is located about 500 yards away and then enlarged the resulting JPEG files on my computer using a 23" HP LCD screen. I did not print them out but viewed them at 200-300% to check out every bit of detail. I used ISO speed from 100 to 3200 to get an idea of how well the noise reduction worked on each camera without sacrificing image quality, RESULTS: The best camera from ISO 100 to 1600 - Sony A3000. The second best - Canon T3i ( not as good as the Sony from ISO 100-1600, but just a little better than the Sony at 3200), third place goes to to the Olympus E-PL1 which did very well when you consider that it has a 12mp sensor versus the others that range from 14.2MP to 20.1MP. In LAST place is the Nikon D3100. The D3100 is better than my old Nikon D40x for sure but not as good as any of the other cameras I used in this comparison. You could say that it is not fair since the Nikon has 14.2MP and the others that rated better have 18-20MP. But then, the Olympus with 12.3MP also did better than the D3100! In terms of Video quality, the Canon T3i and Sony A3000 are pretty close with the T3i being slightly better. The Olympus PL1 fell to last place because the output is in 720p when all the others are 1080p. Nikon D3100 took third place in video quality. Hope that helps a little in clearing up some of the picture quality issues between at least this batch of cameras.