This digital camera is great because of its image quality, full set of manual controls and the best battery life in its class. Indeed, it produces good pictures with well saturated colors, good sharpness from corner to corner, little distortion and good resolution. The downsides are few (image noise and slowness) but are very common with most compact cameras. If  speed is important, you may trade low-light performance, some manual controls and battery-life by getting the Fuji Finepix E550 which also produces good looking pictures. For less noisy images it is necessary to get a higher-end (more expensive) camera, most likely a larger model.