Once I finish reading the manual (a bloody tome). It should be fun. Any thoughts or opinions? This link should answer a lot of your questions. We are talking about a point and shoot camera with some advanced features so I am sure you will enjoy it once you learn all about its bells and whistles. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxa1... i'm not sure if it's the same model number, but when i did research i found that optio has inferior glass. it wasn't that sharp, had a tendency to be blurry on one side (due to crooked cmos). and many pictures had a lot of noise. i instead got the Fuji F30 - not slr quality, but has clear images to iso800 with the ability to shoot at iso3200 - not greatly, but usable at 50%. | 