Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When i read in The New York Times "Circuits" that the Canon SD800IS has face-recognition focusing and wide angle optics, I immediately went to Amazon to order it. The reviews about the plasticy body and wide-angle optic problems gave me pause, but i figured I could learn to live with the problems. Not so much. My first major disappointment was with the face-recognition focusing feature, the main reason I bought this camera. The little brackets scoot around on the LCD and settle on faces all right--that part is cool. But much less cool is the fact that out of scores of photographs, with both natural light and flash, I have yet to capture ONE photograph in which ALL the faces are in focus. Objects near, but behind the faces, are often sharply in focus, but not the faces themselves. Bad news. Face-recognition focusing is a great idea, but Canon has not yet perfected it. My second disappointment was the obvious loss of sharpness at full wide. I went to a local camera store to compare my SD800 with a SD700. Same loss with the SD700. Clearly Canon rushed the SD800 to the marketplace without addressing a prevous problem. Another optical problem is pronounced CA (blue fringing) in high contrast area (especially at intense white boundaries), a major issue since fringing is almost impossible to remove. The SD700 also had this problem, but it seems worse in the SD800. I'm also getting far too many overexposed photographs. The flash also varies all over the place, and too often doesn't properly illuminate the subject. I've fiddled with exposure controls, read the user's manual closely, and still haven't figured out a solution to this problem. Other reviewers have addressed the camera's flimsy body, and those reviewers are correct. I still can't believe Canon would release a $400.00 camera whose battery compartment alone is so inadequate. In sum, I strongly advice cosumers considering the SD800IS to check it out IN PERSON at a camera outlet. My sense is that Canon rushed out this camera for reasons of marketing, without addressng the problems of the SD700 and without adequate testing the SD800's new features. I'm sending back my SD800IS and will wait until Canon (or another company) works out the glitches of face-recognition technology and all the other problems of the SD800IS. By the way, the one feature that works great is Canon's Image-stabilization, but I already have a pair of binocs that do that.