Corrupts pictures. DO NOT buy. Not even suitable for children.

I have a great dSLR, but I wanted a compact point-and-shoot for a trip to Disney. I have several other Samsung products I love, so I thought the S860 would be a good fit. Boy was I wrong!

The camera would routinely freeze when I tried to turn it on or view pictures. The only way to fix this was to remove and re-insert the batteries. When the camera would start, it was capable of taking good pictures, but it was always hit-or-miss.

For example, I used the Digital Image Stabilization to get some clear shots from a moving vehicle at Animal Kingdom. Yet some of the portrait shots I took while both the subjects and I were standing perfectly still were inexplicably blurry. Some of the Scene Modes worked well also, but you never knew if a picture would last long enough to be downloaded.

While viewing pictures in the camera, some of them would momentarily flash on the screen and then disappear, replaced by a "File Corrupt" error. When I tried to download these pictures, they could not be retrieved. This happened at random, to pictures I had just taken, but also to pictures I had already viewed successfully in the camera!

Since I started with a new SanDisk SD card formatted in the camera, I doubted that was the cause. I checked Google and found I was not alone. Apparently the S860 corrupts the JPEG metadata while reading it. I stopped viewing pictures in the camera, but it still corrupted files.

The battery life was so bad it should be criminal. A new set of Duracel AA batteries lasted for 104 pictures over 4 days. Of those 104, 13 were corrupted and could not be retrieved. A new pair of Energizer batteries lasted for 120 pictures over 2 days. Of those 120, only 8 were corrupted. If you look at the numbers, batteries lasted an average of 3 days and the camera randomly corrupted 10% of my pictures. After that I gave up on this camera.

From what I can find through Google, Samsung will send you a replacement S860 with the exact same problems. There apparently is no fix to the firmware, so I DO NOT RECOMMEND this camera for purchase. I cannot honestly think of any purpose for which this camera would be suited.