SLR user switching to mid range Digital camera.

As a long term optical SLR camera operator who wanted a good specification Digital camera I spent a long time evaluating the marketplace.
Important criteria were a high value optical Zoom and a range of modes from fully Automatic to fully Manual.
The Z1 offers a 10x optical Zoom, with the ability to enhance this further with a 4x digital Zoom. The optical zoom works very well, however the digital zoom effectively works by zooming in on the pixels in the memory, thus at maximum the image can be quite grainy.
As with any long lens camera ‘zooming’ the lens will increase the f/stop resulting in longer exposure times, coupled with the zoom magnification, camera movement should be addressed by a tripod or a very steady hand.
The shooting modes of the camera range from fully Automatic, (you do have to manually open the Flash cover if required), then simply point and click. Through Shutter priority, Aperture priority to fully Manual. As well as the exposure flexibility you have a full range of control on the ISO setting, white balance, Flash intensity and manual focus of the lens.
The camera can store short bursts of video, the duration depends upon the amount of free memory and quality of image. As a guide using 256MB storage, 640x480 at 30 fps you should expect to store around 3.5 minutes. Setting the parameters to 160x120 at 15 fps should allow 25-30 minutes. It is possible to turn off the audio recording and extend the video time available. Two weaknesses are that in a quiet environment it is possible to hear the auto focus drive operating on the sound recording (the auto focus cannot be switched off) and secondly the zoom action of the lens is not available, the entire clip must be shot at the same focal length. That said the quality of the playback on 30fps is very smooth.
The final negative point that I have is that the image can only be stored on the memory card in JPEG format, though there are three options regarding the compression factor used. There is no option to store the image as a TIFF thereby eliminating the first stage degradation that occurs when using JPEG storage.
A work colleague purchased the FujiFilm S5000 at the same time I brought the Z1. To be fair the S5000 has a more rugged body, equivalent optical zoom, though slightly lower digital zoom and the ability to extrapolate a 6Mpixel image. The colour reproduction is slightly different and the flexibility of the manual mode is not quite so broad on the S5000.
That said both cameras’ offer good performance but to my mind the Z1 offers a slightly higher manual feature specification Vs cost.