Strengths: Best picture on the market for this price,Capture image while recording video,Good interface,surprisingly compact,crystal clear LCD,hard drive recording

Weaknesses: Flash is too bright,No video record directly to media card,No HDMI cable included,Lack of video editing software for this format,My man hands on the touch screen

Summary: Key things you need to know about this camera to make it work for you. 1. Proper lighting and a lot of it (balanced of course). If you don't have good lighting your video/photos WILL BE grainy. 2. Out of the box, the video is set for a lower bit-rate.. up it to the XP mode. (15Mbps) 3. Don't bother with the 100GB camera - this will give you way more than you need. My guess is that if you are buying this, you are pretty savvy about getting your images off the drive. If you are handy (aka a warranty breaker), I'm sure there will be a hack soon to replace the drive in the camera to something that will cause geek lust. 4. I'd buy an HDMI cable to fit this if you have an HDMI capable tv set. It's just easier. Hey, you just dropped a grand for this and your complaining about a $30 cable (online of course)? 5. The flash is REALLY bright for my taste, you can get an add-on light, but I'm not sure how it performs. 6. The picture is GREAT - Hey, it's HD! 7. When you hit record and then stop - that's a clip. Do that 10 times... 10 clips. Makes it nice to delete "takes" 8. touch screen is a bit small for my man hands - but manageable. 9. switches modes easily between movie and photo mode. 10. the resolution of on-the-fly photographs during movie shooting is lower than that of dedicated photograph shooting. 4MP instead of 6MP