The New Camera!! YAY!!

So here it is. My new and very much loved Canon. After about three months research I finally found this camera. I had a price range of less than $300. I knew I could get lots of good point and shoots and even a couple good compact systems. I had some major requirements though. They were as listed.

• Long optical zoom, at least 10x
• At least 12mp
• Had to have a child/pet mode. With half my pictures being of my nephew I knew it'd help having a special mode just for kids.
• Had to have image stabilization. 
• Had to be a reasonable size. I wanted something I could take everywhere with me, and it wouldn't be weighing me down.

Short list of wants but when you slap a price tag of less than $300 you get an even shorter list of good quality products. I also based my choice largely on reviews of other people that used the camera everyday and seemed to have some knowledge of what they were doing. I knew I wanted either a Nikon or Canon. While on the home stretch of camera hunting I had narrowed my choices to this, my sisters (a canon power shot s95) and one other, another canon. The other Canon, can't remember the name of, I had been looking at met all my expectations, except that it was bulky. My sisters camera was a compact system with 5x optical zoom and 10mp. I knew that it wasn't what I wanted but I still liked it and with the time frame of me needing to find a camera closing in I was just about to load that one into my cart until....

... I met it. It was like the church choir sang while rays of sun rained down around me. It was perfect. Perfect price tag (about $250 about tax) 14x optical zoom, 12 mp, optical image stabilizer, child/pet mode, even had quite a few different scene modes. Including miniature, toy camera effect, color accent, fish eye, poster, snow, firework, underwater, foliage, low light, beach... ok so I did name just about all of them but come on they're some pretty cool scene modes.

Here's a generic picture of it, I thought this best represented how the product was and with no other good cameras in the house I'd be taking a pretty crappy picture of it.