My Camera, Canon Powershot

 
I recently bought a new camera, Canon Powershot S1 IS. I had a chance to use it during my recent trip to Perhentian Island.
 
My feedback for this camera is good. It has a good balance of features between a fully automatic and advance feature camera. The camera give you certain granular control on the features such as lighting, exposure, focus and so on. On the other hand even with all these features built in, it doesn't make the camera any difficult to use. It is easy to switch between shooting mode and the menu is easy to navigate.
 
The only downside of this camera is its size. It is about 1.5 times larger than the IXUS and of course more heavy. But that is not a really serious consideration factor if you are a photographing enthusiastic and the features advantage of that camera outweight everything else.
 
The design of the camera is slick and it has a thick handle at the right side plus the Image Stabilizer allow you to operate the camera with just one hand(from mode switching to zooming to shooting). I have try to shoot photo using the IXUS camera with one hand, some times the effects are bad because of my hand shakes while taking the photo. With this camera, I don't have this problem. The Image Stabilizer will autocorrect the image if the degree of shaking is within a small threshold.
 
Its major differentiation features, which is a 10x optical zoom capability is very useful especially when taking outdoor photo and scenery. It give me quite abit of flexibility when positioning my image.
 
Another feature that I really like alot is it allow me to change my focus frame(I am not sure whether other cameras beside SLR has this feature as well). I change the focus frame which is normally at the center to the side (where my friend is standing in the photo) when taking a sun set photo. The outcome is the flash is now directed to my new focus frame and doesn't spoil the sun set effect. I can see my friend's face and the round shape orange color sun both clear and sharp in the photo.
 
I would recommend this camera to anyone who want to shoot professional photos but don't want the complexity and technical knowledge of operating a SLR.
 
Another camera that have similar capability is Olympus C760 and C770. But the cons of these 2 camera is that it use XD memory card which is about twice the price of Compact Flash(used by Canon) of similar storage capacity.
 
http://camera.canon.com.my/products/digital/camera/powershots1is/index.htm