This is the self portrait of the device :-)
The IS stands for Image Stabilization and it helps to prevent shaky out of focus pictures and warns you if it is shaking more than it can stabilize. I use to take a Canon SLR but it was big and hard to carry all the time. The Canon 850 is small enough to fit in a pants pocket so I take it everywhere as many pictures are unplanned. The videos in this blog were shot with it. The zoom is no where as good as an SLR and the biggest problem is focusing. There is only auto focus and that sometimes just will not cooperate. I turned off the face detection in the focus features and that helped. One really great feature that the camera does have is a quick zoomed preview of the picture just taken to make sure it was in focus. Even with the SLR there were times when you didn't know the picture was out of focus unless you did a review and zoomed in or waited until downloading and that was too late! One additional complaint is the lack of a battery gauge. It only appears when the battery is low - very low - sort of telling you that you are SOL :-(
Cleaning up videos and combining them and posting them is a whole new experience. It is very time consuming and slow to upload them. I have been using Adobe Premiere Elements 4 which can directly upload to YouTube.
