I bought this camera to take with me on an expedition into the Amazon rainforest, which is one of the most difficult situations to take photography due to its constant low lighting and moving subjects.
The auto function on the camera was good, but was inadequate in low lighting, I found if I switched to manual I got much better photographs, but the problem with that was that it took me a while to get used to the functions before being quick enough to catch anything worthwile, but thats true of any camera when you first buy it.
One morning the sun was rising and there was a wonderful red tint in the sky which I wanted to catch, so I put it on the sunset setting and the result was fantastic, the colours were perfect if not more vivid than in real life, other people took the same photo on their cameras, and some of these had SLRs etc but nobody got close to having the colours I had.
This is true in most cases actually, even on auto I didnt have many instances where the photos were overexposed or underexposed, mostly the exposure was smack on the only problem I had was the fact that in low lighting, things tended to come out slightly blurry but I don't think thats the cameras fault, any camera would have had difficulty.
The zoom is fantastic, although I would have liked a bit more but I think unless I had infinate zoom I would never be happy, so 14x is plenty for now.
The macro function on the camera is fantastic, you can pretty much be touching the subject with your lense your that close and still it would focus, I did have problems whilst doing macro at night, because if you got too close and used the flash you tended to have a shadow across the bottom of the photo, because the lense gets in the way of the flash. but as long as this doesn't cover the subject then you can easily crop that out of the photo.
In some cases the auto focus had difficulty focusing on subjects, but with the manual focus you can override that and find the focus yourself, which is fab, especially with it being on ring, its much easier to control the focus, and many a time I found Id prefer to do it manually because you had better results and also the satisfaction of doing it yourself, it makes the photo mean more if you've done it manually.
Its a very handsome camera also and although its much heavier than my old camera, I never felt that it was too heavy, even though I was trekking through the jungle most days, I didnt once think it was too bulky and got in the way.
Overall I think this is a great camera, I was proud of some of my photos, and if you don't want to go straight to SLR, its a fab bridge camera, which sometimes in my opinion can be better than SLR.
Its not the cheapest camera on the market, nor is it the most expensive, I think that the price is right, I wouldn't pay any more for it, and any less would not give it the respect that it deserves. Well done Fuji and thanks for the memories.