"I went out and shot another 200+ photos this morning.
A few more notes on thing I've ""discovered"" while shooting today.
I shot a couple short vids, used flash, turned off the camera multiple times and allowed it to hibernate many times, zoomed in and out and still the camera showed 1/4 of battery life left. Obviously if you're going to use this in a photo rich environment, carry a spare battery. Always better safe than sorry.
Some reviewers said they couldn't find any usable photos using HDR. I found it more than usable and will attach a couple photos to allow comparison.
I was using a grade 6 SD card today. That is the minimum Nikon recommends. It took approximately 13 seconds for the camera to process an HDR photo and a couple more seconds to write it to the card. Camera continues to show practically no lag time when taking standard shots. Only panoramas and HDR slow things down, with HDR certainly taking the longest. Nikon does have a progress bar that appears across the bottom so you don't think the camera is locked up.
While using full (or near full) zoom and in Auto mode, the camera did a fair amount of searching to focus on an item while in MACRO. Since my previous Lumix TZ5 was less than optimal in low light focusing, I am used to using either PROGRAM or Aperture priority on the Nikon to achieve focus on the intended target.
In what i consider ""medium light"" the camera refused to allow an aperture setting to maintain an narrow field of focus.
I'm certainly not down-grading my rating of the camera. I like it very much.
Just remember it is not a DSLR. In comparison it has a tiny sensor. There are always trade-offs. I am more convinced that this camera will suit my intended uses very well. The VR at extreme zoom still impresses me, as does the low light sensitivity and noise. Yes, there's noise, even at 560 ISO. It's not distracting however. Wait for the camera geeks to test and publish their data (i.e. dpreview.com) to get the hard statistics. My over all impression still stands and I'm glad I took a gamble and pre-ordered this camera and was on the initial round of deliveries from Amazon.
