They have very tiny image sensors to begin with, and cramming more, smaller pixels onto an already tiny sensor often results in even heavier "noise" in the photos.

The camera takes nice pictures and is a very good price for a 12 megapixel camera.

If one shoots higher ISO under 'normal' mode, the image becomes pixelated with lots of noise.

At 400 ISO there is some sign of image noise, but overall quality is still fairly good.

It had to be fairly cheap and a wide angle lens was needed.

The wide angle end is equivalent to 37mm.

aperture gets smaller.

The maximum aperture is f/3.1 at the wide end and a rather slow f/6.7 at full telephoto.

Since the camera lacks manual controls, I simply set the camera on the scene mode that would give me this fast shutter speed.

The 3.6x zoom lens has a zoom range equivalent to 37 – 134mm, which while not particularly wide-angled is at least longer than average.

Great entry-level camera, cheap, small and light weight, user friendly menus and features, be sure to read the user manual before you use the camera, there are a lot of features hiding there.

Pop in its batteries and the camera has a nice weight to it, making it feel like a sturdy, well-built camera.