Wow. Incredible. But get a generic spare battery.

My wife and I like photography but we are into RESULTS and we view the equipment as a means, not an end in itself. We have a few decent SLRs but they are now sitting in their cases gathering dust. After comparing a lot of reviews here and elsewhere we went with the C-5000 because it was one of the only small-size digital cameras we could find that had an external flash adapter. We bought the 128 MB memory card because whatever came with it was woefully inadequate. (What were they thinking?) Consider the cost of the extra memory as part of the camera price. We have never used the memory that came with it.

Anyway, the camera itself produces mind-boggling, incredibly detailed, amazing pictures. The color is perfect. These pictures are ultra-high-res. I can take a picture of an entire room full of people and crop it down to one person and still have good detail. The only thing to watch out for is red-eye (see below). Anyway, the C-5000 is the only camera we use now. We notice that we use the viewfinder more than the little LCD screen when taking pictures, but the LCD screen is great for looking at what you just took, and for managing the camera.

The thing has a few hundred sophisticated features such as spot sampling that we haven't figured out yet, mostly because there is no need. We point and shoot and the results are simply fantastic. I used to think big lenses were necessary for this kind of photo. Even the lens cap is well-designed: aside from the tether, it is designed to pop off if you turn on the camera without first removing the lens cap. (When you turn on the camera, the lens telescopes out about an inch.)

It's really small -- it fits in a pocket -- and we've banged it around a lot. No problems.

In addition to getting the 128MB upgrade, I'd recommend getting a spare battery, but don't get one from the place you buy the camera. We found one from AsenaShop for $15.95. It's called a "Sakar BP-Li10B battery for Sanyo and Olympus cameras."

We also bought a spare computer cable from a local computer store since we lost the one that came with the camera. $15 for a cable. Yecch.

Now, the software -- consider the software just a method for getting the photos from the camera into your computer. Use a different photo editor. The software doesn't allow you to selectively erase stuff from the camera. It's just a basic utility and then they try to sell you an upgrade, but there are a lot of great photo editor software packages out there.

No software is particularly good at removing redeye (unless we're doing something wrong). The red-eye reduction feature in this camera, like other cameras, isn't worth much. Any small camera that has a flash unit right near the lens will produce redeye. That's why we bought the C-5000, since it has an external flash adapter. With an external flash, the one problem with this camera is solved. It looks rather odd, since we use the flash unit we had been using with our SLR -- which is bigger than the camera itself.

My father was a photographer in his day, and he used an old Kodak bellows camera with 620 film (huge negatives) that could be blown up to poster size with spectacular results, but the light had to be good and he had to take lots of photos with different settings to try to get the right one. He would have been amazed that this tiny camera could exceed the resolution of those huge negatives.