My only complaints about the camera are the lack of a really good optical zoom and the weight, although neither are too serious. It comes with a 2x optical zoom and 3x digital zoom. I've found that the digital zoom is pretty worthless (as compared to what you can do in photoshop), although theoretically you get something by magnifying the raw CCD data rather than the JPEG-compressed data. At some point I'll probably end up getting a telephoto and fisheye lens for it, but it really does what I need right now. As for the weight; it weighs about 1lb with batteries. This is fine for me, although it makes an Elph2 APS camera feel like a credit card.
Using a digital camera like this without rechargable batteries is fine, but I think you probably save a lot of money in the long run with two sets of four nice NiMH AA's and a wall charger. The wall charger that came with my camera suppots 120/240v, so all I needed was a plug adapter. The nice (1500mah or so) nimh batteries last a fair bit longer than standard alkaline AA's. Also, flash cards eat much less power when reading, so transfers with USB are livably fast (I can download about 72 megs of pictures in 8.5 minutes, which is fast enough for me). PCMCIA transfers are completely limited by network bandwith right now, so they're effectively fast enough.
In any case, I like the camera a lot, and I'm very glad that I chose to go with a 2 megapixel camera. Pictures like this, this, and and this are why. 8x10" prints can be made of the first two, and a reasonably large print can be made of the third.
I like www.zing.com as a free photo album place. I will place some of my photos up there to make ordering prints easier. The only album I have right now is Chamonix. digital camera resource is a really cool site for digital camera news.
