Kyocera Finecam S5R

Opinion: I have been shooting since I was 12 (I'm 50). I've used many cameras. Yashica (first was a Electro 35 Gold). Canon. Nikon. Olympus. Contax. And for the 14 years, a Leica rangefinder. I wanted to go 'digital' but I wanted a camera that would be as light and quick as the Leica. And with a decent optics. While some digital cameras are certainly up to the task, their bulk and energy requirements were far from my desires. So in the meantime, I got a digital film scanner and continued shooting on 35mm. The Contax TVS digital came out and while I was intrigued by the potential of the optics I was totally unimpressed with the infuriating 'shutter lag'. Plus parallax issues abounded. Then this the S5R came out. Wow! This camera is lightning fast. Powers up instantly. Shoots high resolution equally as fast. Shot after shot. It's small, but it's remarkably heavy and well-built. So camera shake is minimal. Best of all, on checking images vs the viewfinder, the parallax (on wide shots at least) is negligible-a very very good thing. The images load down to pc in a jiffy. It takes the SD memory cards (I carry 256 MB units which hold about 100 Fine images). And the optics, are excellent. (I figured the Kyocera people had to have learned one or two things from their association with Zeiss.) In short, Kyocera nailed it. P.S. I use an external 4.6 amp-hour battery with an adapter plug for extended use. Keeps things down a lot.

Opinion: This small 'gadget' is a very serious player. I was told that the S5R was extremely fast and full of features, so that was my basic drive to buy it. After a week i still feel surprised by this camera, and good for me, in a very positive way. My father also bought a 5M pix cam, but for only 100 Euro less. He never heard of shooting 3 pix a second until the card is full, 640x480 with 30 fps, and lots more options that are standard on mine. Keep this S5R in mind when considering a small good looking camera with some very serious and good working features. Apologise for my English, but i hope you all get the picture!
<<PS. make sure you buy a large fastspeed 10MB/s sd card, not the standard sd card>>

Opinion: Simple camera which makes excelent pictures. You can zoom during macro - rare, it extends macro from 12cm to 4cm. Very fast picture review in a few steps 2, 4, 8 - effective for sharpness control.
It's our family pocket camera, I have Sony F828 for more serious playing.

Opinion: I gave it to my wife for Christmas as a substitute for her film compact. After more than three months with the cam we are really dissapointed. Half of the pics turned out being out of focus, the other half shows a heavy red eye problem we never had with the film compact. A construction problem is the settings wheel in the back which is very easily turned by accident. I really can´t recommend the cam. My wife went back using her old Canon fim point &shoot.