Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

. .I had preordered the HS10 and was really anxious to try it out when I received it. I wasn't too anxious to use the video part of the camera as I intend mainly to use still shots. So I spent much of the weekend trying out various function of the camera. I set up a series of shots where I varied the ISO from 100 to 3600 and evaluated the results. As expected, the lower ISO settings produced little noise. In fact, noise levels were quite low even at ISO 800. I think one could be comfortable with all results at ISO 400 or less but still be reasonably satisfied with ISO 800. As expected, the higher the ISO, the more the noise but even ISO 6400 produced usable results. For most situations, this camera should produce very low noise shots. . .Unlike some of the reviewers, I like the modest weight of this camera. It helps me minimize shaking when I take pictures. I also like the tightness of the zoom. I had an expensive Nikon lens which was loose but moved in or out if the camera was held facing up or down (called lens creep). I have been using a Nikon D80 with a long zoom lens and this is a much heavier camera. This HS10 was to be used to compliment the D80 and be used in places where I did not want to take the D80. I picked the Fuji since I expected the lens system to be nearly as good as that of some DSLRs. . .I was right in that the quality of the lens is great and the stabilization is outstanding. I was able to get sharp images of printed material on license plates on cars about 400 feet away using full zoom and hand held. This really impressed me. On top of this, I found little distortion at full zoom with little to no purple fringing. This is better than the expensive Nikon lens I had been using. Again, impressive. I am not sure this will hold under all circumstances. I will let the expert reviewers determine this. . .I was able to figure out the menus fairly easily but did have to run back to my computer to read some information from the PDF manual. I know cost is a factor but a printed manual sure would help. The small printed material that comes with the camera is fairly trivial. . .Now for the negatives and they are significant. In taking about 220 pictures, I used 4 sets of batteries - 2 alkaline sets and 2 rechargeable sets. This is truly not acceptable and I am going to try to find out how to either return this camera or perhaps get a software fix (if there is one). This failing alone is enough to justify returning the camera. I have read others say that they had good battery life so mine may be a fluke. . .The second problem was with the time needed to save shots. I have been using a DSLR and was able to take RAW shots and save them with little lag time between shots. I expected the HR10 to have some lag but was not prepared for the 6-9 second delay between single shots for RAW. If you shoot burst mode, you can shoot multiple shots with no delay between shots. I did this of flying birds with great results. However, after the burst, if shooting RAW, there is over a 10 second delay as the shots are recorded. Even using JPEG produces a delay of ~5 seconds. I did not time the saving of RAW+JPEG mainly because I was frustrated by the time lag of RAW and JPEG alone. . .I have numerous SDHC level 6 cards and all give the same results when saving either JPEG (~3 sec) or RAW (~6 sec) shots. My wife has an underwater camera that requires SDHC/6 cards and at 10 megapixels, it takes less than a second to record JPEG. To eliminate variation from cards, I used the internal memory to record some shots. Guess what? The same results. I can accept slower for RAW but JPEG should be fast. I read comments from another owner (on another site) who had the same problem with slow saving so perhaps there may have been some poor quality control with the making of this camera. I have had experience with 6 other digital cameras and this camera has a slow save. . .I will be contacting FUJI and probably Amazon since I feel I have a truly flawed camera. For those of you considering the HS10, you might want to wait until full reviews are out and see if my camera was simply a dud or if the FUJI HS10 does indeed have some major flaws.