It's a mixed review. The convenience of flash instead of tape is very cool. Battery life with the bigger battery is fine and the 12x zoom is awesome.
Video in bright light is awesome. Video indoors or in darker conditions shows a lot of grain and noise. The reviews before I bought the camera indicated very good night performance but I'm not finding that or maybe I just need to see the normal cameras to get a better expectation for 'good'. Handling wise, it's a little too small. It's hard to take still pictures given where the button is, I guess there is such a thing as too small.
Still photos are disappointing. The pictures look whited out and grainy. We had a Sony DSC-P200 7.2 megapixel camera with us also and it absolutely blows the Canon away for stills. It's not even close.