The pictures are very good and make excellent backgrounds for your pc at 1280 resolution! Videos are also good with fine and standard modes. On a 256mb card you can get about 7 mins of video at standard.

The optical zoom is handy and does make a big difference compared to just having digi zoom. It can't be changed while videoing which is quite unfortunate.

Theres about a million different modes for taking pictures that can produce some really cool effects. But mostly are preset settings for different lights and pictures. For enthusiastic photographers there are quite a few different settings to play with to get disired light levels etc. but the point and shoot mode is v. good with a fast auto-focus (focus can be on single and monitor modes which are handy in different situations) Buttons are well placed for easy usage and the quick review button is very handy.

The startup time is reasonable (not as good as the cannon isus 40) but still slow enough to make you miss some great shots here and there.

In my opinion 4.1 mega pixels is sufficient for the average user and produces big pics. When you get 7mp the are just unecesicarily big and take up memory card space much faster!