Hard to say, whether I would recommend it, I have been taking photos for a few years and I have Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS, I enjoy working with the photos, and this camera takes some very nice ones. For the money, I think it is the best prosumer cam you can buy, it does not have the image quality of some of the others, but they are priced much higher. I don't know if I've posted this here, but the camera has some noise at 100%, it has an overly aggressive jpeg compression, and only offers one jpeg compression setting for less than 12 MP. At normally viewed sizes on the web and prints up to 8 X 10 (I can't print larger so don't know about larger prints) the noise is not an issue, but it would be noticable at a 100% crop. If you don't mind processing your photos in photoshop or other program, the noise is fairly easily overcome. There is a pay for play program that does an excellent job removing noise with very little or no loss of detail. It's called neat image (
www.neatimage.com), it's got a free trial, which I think is indefinite if you do not use it for commercial gain. All that said, I believe (although I can't prove it) that all of the larger mega pixel cams have noise in their images at 100% crop, I could be wrong, but I believe it's true.
Now, the question is...do you like my images, all the pics from the point I [posted the first pics with my brand new cam, are from my fuji s7000, if you like them, then I'm happy with the camera, if you don't...I don't think it's the camera's fault, but the photgraphers
This cam, is very user friendly, has lots of features, has awesome color rendition (the best) it's fast, great ergonomics, etc...