karohemd | First impressions of the F11

It's compact but feels reasonably hefty, it has a big display but no viewfinder (which isn't really helpful in bright daylight), 3x optical zoom, a reasonable macro mode, variable ISO setting (80-1600), Auto, Shutter and Aperture priority and a lot of configurable settings (white balance, exposure compensation etc.).

I took it out for lunch but didn't take any real photos as I couldn't find anything interesting (and the sun had suddenly disappeared) but I took some candid shots from the hip at a wedding party at St. Andrew's, tried out the macro mode on some plants etc.

Testing the macro feature

Finding the right spot to focus on is a bit tricky

This is the best I could do in post-editing. I'll have to see how the exposure compensation works.

Taking candid pics from the hip is fun, though and works reasonably well:

They're all a bit blurry because I was walking while taking them.
I'm going to take a few more during the weekend to see what else it can do (incl. video) but it seems OK so far. It also has drawbacks.
While it has a large res (the same as my D70), the image quality doesn't come close (I'm going to take some comparison pics tomorrow). It has various features for controlling the imaging during shooting but they're all hidden down several levels of menus rather than being accessible with one button so it's not very practical.
Images taken at ISO800 and above seem incredibly noisy. Again, needs to be tested further.

Other practical drawbacks are the lack of a viewfinder, a proprietary battery which means if it's dead you can't just put in spare AAs, and one really stupid one:
The automatic flash and the automatic ISO setting aren't talking to each other. I had everthing set on auto and took a pic of my rather dark room. Naturally, the flash went off but when I checked the details I saw that it was also set to ISO 800 (which was adequate for the situation). How stupid is that? No problem for me because I won't use either feature in auto mode but for your average user this could be annoying.

Still, it's good for what it is, a compact you can just take with you anywhere. However, it just shows that megapixels aren't everything if they aren't backed up by decent camera hardware.