You can shoot at normal or high resolution, and at 14 megapixels you will get resolution easily good enough for printing photos or posters.

The sixteen megapixels (can you believe a camera in this price range has 16mp)?

The SL300 features a 14 megapixel CCD sensor with sensor-shift image stabilisation, a massive 30x optical zoom with a focal range of 24-720mm, 720p HD video at 30fps, a 3 inch 460k dot LCD screen, faster start-up, improved auto-focus speed and an upgraded response time.

Once you get a couple of priority mode settings down and reduce the photos to a smaller size in-camera at around 7 megapixels, then images improve a good deal; of course, this means in order to get the best from this camera, you're sacrificing pixels - and you're paying essentially for a 7 megapixel camera instead of a 16 megapixel camera.

The 24 mm wide angle of the lens is nice when I need a photo of the bigger picture.

And I love the looooong zoom range - 24-720 is PRETTTTYYYY impressive.

You do not have the range of creativity that a more expensive true SLR camera would offer, particularly with its limited aperture settings, but you can take some pretty nice photos with this camera.

The shutter speed in Aperture Priority, aperture in Shutter Priority and both in Program Mode are only displayed if the Dynamic Range is not set to Auto.

The 30x optical zoom means that you can reach subjects that are too far away for the majority of cameras, even other superzooms, and the camera looks good and is built to a decent standard.

Not a great choice for bird and wildlife watchers if you expect the full zoom out of it to work perfectly, then.

For its size it is quite lightweight.

Although it won't satisfy the person looking for a teeny, tiny camera, in every other way this is without any hesitation an excellent purchase.