Well, that's joy for me - true and pure. A new toy - yabbadabadoo!!! I tell you, if you wanted to bottle and sell euphoria, you'd give me new pieces of technologies and harvest my emotion.

The R6 is very impressive on paper, although I'm not so sure about it in practice for what I wanted it for (P&S). Its most noteworthy feature is the incredible zoom - x7 Optical, using some unique Ricoh technology which actually works - really, really well. (It's a 28-200mm, 35mm equivalent - wide angle). 7MP is reasonable by today's standards (and I'm not going to be printing anything larger than an A4 sheet, and even that rarely). The Image Stablilisation is all it's cracked up to be, and the thing is damn fast (we're talking no perceptible shutter lag).

Although for all Ricoh's skill with the optical hardware it seems they just don't have it when it comes to the chipset and software. The Camera just doesn't have the "intelligence" I've seen in others. With my Canon the camera for 9/10 times will reliably select a suitable ISO, Whitebalance, ect. for the situation (particularly the newer Canons with the DIGICIII processor, such as the Canon IXUS 850 IS which I had for a week before swapping it for the Ricoh - a decision which I now regret). With the R6 you really have to adjust the settings for each situation, which not be so bad if the controls were laid out with a little more sense. Oh well.

It's still good, however it just isn't really the P&S I needed - it's just a compact camera, albeit with a whole bunch of bells and whistles.

I'm still happy.