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  It's a good camera

PROS: It's a good camera

OVERALL SCORE:5/10

  My P80 consistently overexposes bright landscape scenes in auto mode.

PROS: Great zoom range, compact and light weight, ease of use.

CONS: Overexposes landscapes when in auto mode (anyone else found this?); light weight is at expense of flimsy feel unbecoming to the Nikon name; difficult to adjust zoom precisely; battery size (life) also sacrificed to redjuce weight; slow start-up.

OVERALL SCORE:6/10

  I like it....But I had to learn it....

PROS: Excellent photo quality. Great dynamic range. Zoom lens works great. Scene modes help with difficult situations. Sports mode captures photos at 13 frames/second (3Mp). Scene settingswork well. I have found that once I read the manual I was able to take much better photos.

CONS: Movie mode looks blocky sometimes. Only digital zoom during video mode. Automatic white balance does not work for florescent lighting, heavy red color cast. Sports mode will sometimes select a high ISO setting giving high noise pictures. Sun glints in sports mode will light up a entire column of the CCD. Purple fringing at the extreme end of the zoom.

OVERALL SCORE:6/10

  Fast and Clear.

PROS: Starts up quick and focus works well. No Problem inside with ambient light. Actually looks better without flash. Wide angle is a welcome addition. Don't hesitate for all around use. It will not disapoint you as long as you pay attention to the subject. Nice!

CONS: Could use a fold-away lcd. No RAW. Would reccomend a flash shoe. Other than that, it is superb for its class.

OVERALL SCORE:9/10

  An Excellent SuperZoom...Little CA and PF. Very Good Battery Life...Very Good IQ

PROS: My friend owns the FZ 218. Very nice camera, no doubt. However...I find my P80 performs a bit better in the IQ department....IF you take the time toactually read the manual and take care to adjust the many image parameter settings that are available in the P80. Battery life is very good. The ergonomics are well thought out. I find the FZ 18 to be somewhat noisier in the IQ sense.The Panny sensor is well known for its noise. perhaps when the Venus IV engine is used in the FZ19...things will be a bit better as the TZ5 is an improvement over the Panny TZ3. The AF on both cameras can be a bit slow in low light. No surprise there..but they are comparable. These are two excellent choices. The Nikon P80 has the advantage of the D-Lighting setting which helps the DR, not the Panny.

CONS: As in every superzoom I tried, low light focusing at the tele end could b better. I do take great exception to the negative review that you see here. He obviously has not spent enough time learning how to properly use the P80. The FZ 18 and P80 are both excellent choices. To say that one is the clear cut choice would be very misleading...unless you are a confirmed Panny or Nikon fan with the prejudices that brings to a fair evaluation.

OVERALL SCORE:8/10

  dont buy it

PROS: Great body design, decent flash, good sports continuous mode, nice video mode with zooming.

CONS: I purchased this camera and was extremely dissatisfied with the image quality, sever fringing and aberrations at max telephoto, terrible low light performance, no raw, dead pixel, bad battery life. Don't buy this, get the Panasonic Fz18, it's got absolutely everything over this camera except for compactness and zooming during video mode, which I suppose matters to some people, not to me however.

OVERALL SCORE:6/10

  very fine prosumer alternative to digital SLRs

PROS: This camera has both enormous flexibility and for people who are not particularly technologically inclined, point and shoot simplicity. Control architectures are entirely intuitive, and I did not even need to look at the owner's manual to access virtually every feature in the camera. Reasonably fast in terms of how long it takes the camera turned on, store an image, etc. I have not had a chance to look at the images, and I don't know whether there is some distortion at the extremes of wide angle and telephoto. There certainly is a very useful wide-angle (27 mm equivalence) and an enormous telephoto setting of 487 mm. Additionally, it seems lighter than the competition, and a major improvement over the Coolpix 5700 and its descendents, which clearly was the antecedent design target.

CONS: no major ones that I can see so far. Probably doesn't have the absolute speed of processing that the new generation of digital SLRs possess.

OVERALL SCORE:9/10