Great Point and Shoot

I bought the A340 with cradle for $150 at circuit city. Came with a set of rechargeable batteries. 4 mega pixels. For that price a little lag between pictures is just fine. Pix quality very good, usually shoot at highest resolution. Bought a 512 meg memory card ($75) so I would never run out of room. Plastic case is holding up. Dropped once on floor without harm. Also survived being in a pocket with a set of keys (oops). The charging/transfer cradle comes with an insert to fit your model of Fujifilm camera. If you buy a second cradle ($50 Compusa), you will need to buy a second insert ($25 with shipping Fujifilm) unless you want to carry around the one that came with the camera. In bright sunlight the on screen menus are hard to read. You can adjust the beep associated with taking a picture, but even on high it is hard for me to hear, and in bright sunlight with the screen washing out, I sometimes wonder if I got the shot. I do like the ability to focus on a spot, hold the shutter down part way to freeze the focus, then recompose the shot. I'm sure most all cameras have this feature, but it is nice to have this one controllable capability. Keep your thumb off the back of the camera, or you may accidently change the flash preferences. This is strictly a point and shoot. But it fits in my pocket and does the job. I get the picture while others are still looking for their camera or wishing they had brought it along. I did not like the software that came with the camera. Moved to Google's free Picassa2 and am really pleased. It handles pix transfer, organizing, and some touch up.