Welp, finally got my camera. Canon PowerShot S110 Digital Elph, known to the rest of the world as the "Digital IXUS V". Merry Christmas To Me!

Wow, what a great freaking camera. Fantastic!

The camera arrived in good condition for a decent price. The only screw-up is that the company promised a 128mb memory card, but instead sent a pair of 64s instead of a 128. I assume they ran out of 128 stock (the invoice did say 128:qty:1), and they knew it was a Christmas gift, they thought it was more important to fulfill the order as best they could. In that case, I think they made a good decision.

Since I can still fit a crapload of pictures on the 64, and I'm going to be carrying the extra battery and charger with me anyhow, it's probably no big deal to cart the second memory card around, too. Which brings me to my only complaint about the camera: Sucky battery life!

I admit that, since it was the first day, I was futzing around with it a little more than I normally would in a given day of shooting pictures. But seriously, I only shot about 30 pictures and one movie on the thing, and the battery was crying uncle before dinner time.

It's a good thing the camera has the mail-in offer for the extra battery (along with some other useless crap), or I'd be disappointed.

By my calculations, if I can keep an extra fully-charged battery handy and I'm careful with the usage, then this camera could make it through the proverbial Day At Disneyland, which is all you can really ask of any digital camera, right?

And on the good side, the battery charges pretty darn fast, considering. And it's the kind of battery that doesn't have "charge memory" so I don't need to fully discharge it before charging it again. I mean, heck, it could be worse, I could have to keep buying AAA's for it.

I'm pretty happy with the camera's features overall. The image quality is good, although I shot a day's worth of pictures with the data-compression set to the "medium" setting (called "fine" on the camera), and discovered that I should have had it set to super-fine all along. Didn't fill the memory card hardly at all, but wanted to pull more detail out of the pictures I did take.

The stitch-assist mode is nice. Came in handy to get some panoramic shots of the snow-covered mountain view from the in-law's dining room. Very nice. Basically, you tell the camera you're going to do a multi-image panorama, and it literally shows you where to move the camera to take the next shot in the series.

Now, I have one question for those who own this camera and know something about it:

The software that comes with it is severely bloated. I've already got all the image-processing tools I want. But they have a 120-meg program for the main software interface. ICK!

Okay, I installed its TWAIN driver and I can easily grab camera pictures straight from the camera into my personal-favorite imaging application. So I don't really need their bloated bundled software. But what I'd really like to do is mount this thing's filesystem directly from the USB cable. So that I could simply drag the files (or use a batch file to XCOPY) into a destination folder on my hard disk. I want to do this without first importing it into an imaging application (and the tedious series of SAVE AS's that entails), and without installing their huge 120-meg bloatware onto my hard drive. Anyone have any ideas on how I can do this?

Note: I know I could probably do this with a CompactFlash reader doohickey, but why would I want to do that when the camera itself is a perfectly good CompactFlash reader with a USB cable and everything?