Wow! You take great macros!!

Thanks. The camera has a 6X optical zoom (digital zoom is turned off). That combined with being 5 megapixels, it's easy to crop the picture and still have a decent quality image. I just figured out the other day that all images on GOY are scaled to 440 X 330, so I try to resize to those dimensions for the best effect.

Interesting thought.

Well interesting, i have'nt a clue what your talking about, but i'm no good with all this tecno stuf, but it is a good picture.

Thanks for the scaling tip! My poor old camera is 3mp with 3x zoom...hoping to replace over the winter with a 6mp & 10x zoom. I think that as long as a computer is used, digital zoom is pretty well useless - easier to get a bad photo with it on. I want to be able to pull in bird photos (they are sooo timid) and hope a 10x would be ok. Don't know about speed though - this one is pretty slow between shots; how is yours?

The only problem with the higher optical zoom is that once using over the 3x zoom any hand movment causes serious blurring, even with the image stabalization (at least with this smaller point and shoot).
On mine I have the quality setting cranked up as high as it goes, and the image dimensions is set to 1600 x 1200 (it goes higher on this camera, but the images get massive and start eating through the memory card quickly. I try not to use the zoom too much. When taking pictures of birds, I zoom as little and possible and would rather crop a large picture around the bird, than zoom too much and end up with a blurry image. This works ok when using higher megapixels.
Our camera is pretty fast between shots. One tip is to turn off the auto review (and sound, if you use it). It saves the batteries, and rather than waiting to look at the picture you just took, and wait for it to be cleared from the screen, the camera is ready to take another picture right away.

thanks for the tecnics. Your pics are great.

Thank you :)