Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I recently purchased the sd870is for a vacation, based largely on the moderately good reviews that it gets. During my two weeks with the camera, I found it in some ways to perform better than any other digital camera I have ever used, and in some ways to perform very poorly. Let's start with the good. Any shots in very bright light turned out great using both the manual settings and the camera's automatic settings. If you take all outdoor shots, this is just about the greatest point and shoot camera in the world. Video also looks pretty dang good, and while not a feature I considered when buying the camera, it was something I used quite often. The controls were all easy enough to use, and while the buttons and settings aren't the best designed things in the world, after playing around with the camera for an hour or so it's not too hard to figure out the main features and how to use them (although some features remain a mystery that even the manual couldn't solve). And on to the bad. While all my outdoor shots were excellent looking, especially for a lower priced digital camera, the camera was really not up to par on indoor shots. On its automatic settings, I found the camera to be rather 'stupid' in determining how to process the shot. Even in moderately bright rooms with plenty of indirect sunlight in the middle of the day, the camera loves to flash the immediate subject and darken the background. Photos in a well lit restaurant would come out with the subject looking pretty good and the background looking like we were in a medieval dungeon. And we were in Florida, so when I say a well lit restaurant, I mean pretty dang sunny. The manual settings performed much better indoors - many of the shots taken at 400 and 800 ISO on the manual setting turned out great. The only problem with these is that you experience quite a bit of blurring when there's not 100% sunlight outside, so for every good indoor photo there were 2 or 3 bad. And of course, if it happens to be dark outside, you get a huge amount of blurring. If one were to look at my photo of the Disney World castle at 7 pm, the automatic setting photo came out as a almost completely black photo with just the windows in the castle barely visible (and that thing is pretty bright). On manual, I had the choice of a blurry mess at 800ISO, or a moderately less blurry mess at 1600 ISO that was so grainy it looked rather like an old newspaper photo. The other digital cameras in the group were quite capable of taking a photo of people with the castle in the background and exposing them correctly while capturing the glowing castle, but the 870 was not. Of course, no inexpensive camera is going to function all that well in darkness, and I wouldn't expect it to. What I do expect from a camera this price is to be able to point and shoot a photo of friends in a well lit hotel lobby without blurring everything or coming out with completely darkened backgrounds. The 870 did not seem to be able to handle this at all, and photos in any lobby or lounge came out like we spent our vacation in the most dimly lit place on earth. As a side note, someone in our party brought their Fuji s700 digital camera, and in my opinion it outperformed the 870 in almost every aspect. The best 20% of the 870's photos looked a bit better than the Fuji's, but the other 80% didn't look anywhere as good. So, despite loving the size and features and most things about this camera, upon arriving home it was packed up and returned. I wouldn't pay more than $150 for something that performs the way the 870 did. Who wants a camera that becomes useless every day at 6:30 pm?