I hate to read manuals and instructions. But with this camera it's something you just have to set aside some time and pretty much read through the well organized little manual that comes with it. It's easy enough reading and well organized with references to page numbers describing each feature and cross referenced well. Perhaps someone with experience on other SLR cameras or more complicated cameras would find this camera intuitive, but I had to sit down a study a bit before really getting into all the features. Once I had the camera set up and tried the different features and settings it was easy enough to do, but there is a little learning curve. The good news is there are many more things I can do with this camera than I ever imagined.
With other cameras I've owned I could take macro photos of things like flowers or food. With this camera I can take a super macro of not only the flower, but the bee on the flower and the hair on his legs! With other cameras low light photos were just so-so. With this camera you can take photos in very low light which I find myself using more and more, now that I have a camera that will handle it. The 20x zoom is nothing short of amazing. This is great for taking photos of outdoor critters or spying on your neighbor's gardener. It's almost like having a pair of binoculars and being able to capture it on digital film. You can take great movies with stereo sound. It's so much easier than getting out the video camera every time you want to take a short movie of the dog doing something cute or your neighbor's kid doing something stupid. There are some special scene settings that are a quick way of setting up the camera for different types of photos. I've had very good results using these and look at all the different circumstances they cover: You have settings for portraits, landscape, night scenes or snapshots, sports, indoor, sunsets, foliage, snow, beach, fireworks (can't wait to try this one out), aquarium, ISO 3200, color accent and color swap.
The flip-out and rotating 2.5-inch LCD screen is a feature I love and I haven't seen it on any other camera in this class. It makes it simple to see what you're taking from any angle and is nice because you can tilt it out of the sun. I find all the buttons, built in flash and controls easy to use and I can re-set it quickly for different types of circumstances. I really like the stitch assist for taking panorama shots that I can later stitch together on my computer into one wide panoramic image. There are so many more settings and things that you can do, just too many to list here.
The camera will definitely not fit in the pocket of my jeans but the weight and size aren't bad. I bought the Carrying Case / Shoulder Bag for the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi, PowerShot S5 IS, Powershot SX1 IS, SX10 IS case which is perfect for this camera. I'm posting a short video showing the case and just a few features of the camera. It's too bad I couldn't use this camera to take the video. The close-ups would have been a lot clearer than what I could do with my video camera. I thought of including some photos taken with the camera on the video, but with the compression needed to fit the videos on this website the wouldn't do them justice. Even the photos posted by other reviewers on this site, as amazing as they are, look even better when you see them on your own computer or printed.
I did a lot of research on cameras and then I hesitated for a long time, wondering if I would use it enough to justify the cost. I shouldn't have waited. This is an amazing camera and one that will keep me happy for a long, long time.