Fantastic camera for beginners like me

I got the Pentax Optio S40 as a birthday present about two or three weeks ago. It's my first digital camera (besides a $40 webcam I bought at Longs Drugs, which doesn't count), so I'm not an expert photographer. But for a point-and-shoot camera for a beginner, I found this to be a fantastic buy.

I bought the camera at Costco for $289 (very cheap, so I hear, for a 4.0 megapixel camera), and it came with a 64mb SD memory card (plus 11mb built-in memory) and two rechargable AA batteries with charger. I've found the 75mb of memory to be plenty for my purposes, but I guess that just depends on how many pictures you take before moving them off the card.

As for battery life, I've been very very impressed. With the included rechargable AA batteries, I've been getting about three (or more) full days of shooting. However, I'm not sure if that's typical, because I tend to take a shot, turn off the camera, and then five minutes later, turn on the camera and take another shot, turn it off, and so on. But the flash was on for most of the pictures and I took a few hundred pictures over the course of a few days, so I would say that if you turn off the camera in between shots you'll get really really solid battery life. I'm especially impressed because I've read that other cameras that use AA batteries have pretty poor battery life, so that's what I was expecting from this one too.

As I said I'm far from an expert on photography, but in my inexperienced opinion, picture quality is great. I've taken some shots of flowers and sunsets and such that came out with stunning colors. All my pictures have been sharp and bright (but not too bright).

I figured out how to use the camera's on-screen menus in minutes, and it's pretty easy to take pictures of almost anything without getting into complicated settings. For beginning photographers like me, it's nice to be able to pick a preset mode for almost anything you could want to take a picture of, from food to flowers to text to landscapes and so on and so on.

Transferring pictures to a computer is really simple. After installing the software, you just plug in the camera, turn it on, and that's about it. The "Device Detector", which always runs in the system tray (I'm not crazy about having it constantly running, but I live with it), pops up after you plug in the camera. You just have to click OK once, and everything else is done for you. Just don't forget to turn on the camera after you plug it in; the first time I used it, I wasted a good fifteen minutes of my life worrying about it due to that little oversight. ;)

This camera has been fabulous for my needs, so here are a few of the things I've done with it, so you can see if your needs are like mine: I took it with me during the last week of school and got some photos of my friends; I like to snap pictures of my dog; there are beautiful sunsets that you can see a few blocks from my house, so I've taken some pictures of those; and so on. No serious photography, but the kind of things that you want good pictures of (for example, my parents used it at my brother's high school graduation).

A few extra pros: sound/ video recording (I haven't experimented much with these features yet) and bright LCD. Also, its sturdy aluminum case and compact (very compact) size make it really easy to stick in a pocket or purse without worrying about it getting hurt.

Overall, the Optio S40 is a perfect camera for the point-and-shoot photographer. It produces beautiful pictures with excellent battery life, and I would recommend it to anyone with needs like mine.