Rating: 
Summary: A great consumer level digital camera, worthy of any home
Review: If you are just an amateur photographer that is either finally switching from analog to digital or just want a decent camera to take on family vacations or school projects, this is a great camera. It is small, lightweight, and does just about anything you could possibly need it to do. It won't take pictures of hummingbirds feeding across a forest bed, but it will take a decent photo of the grand canyon. The quality of the 3x optical zoom is really good, but the picture is sacrificed slightly as you try to artifically enhance it with the digital zoom. The battery life is good enough to take on extended trips from your hotel or on a hike without having to carry around a charger or spare batteries. If you plan on taking lots of high quality large photos, you will need to get a larger memory stick (64 MB will work, 128 MB even better), but the memory stick it comes with will be enough to photograph your child's birthday party as long as you download the photos onto your computer afterwards. At 4.1 MegaPixels, this camera will pick up individual hairs on a persons head and it will even be able to clearly define a flea in the hair. There are 5 MegaPixel cameras out there, but at the consumer level there is really no point in spending the money on one (5 MP won't come in handy unless you are student taking pictures through a microscope or a telescope) All around, while Sony's camera lenses may not compare with Canon or Olympus, Sony makes up for it with their superior knowledge of how to make a great consumer digital device and turn it into a decent digital camera. It is a great value for the price.
Rating: 
Summary: A great camera with 3 small flaws
Review: This camera does what smaller cameras cannot. It takes great pictures indoors and in poor light. It does so because it has a large lens and a powerful flash. Smaller cameras, having smaller flashes and lenses, can work well outdoors but can't compete with this one indoors or in low light.
The problems with this camera are:
1) It's too big to fit conveniently in your pocket.
2) There's an annoying delay of up to 1 second between when to press the shutter release and when the picture is taken.
3) It takes several seconds to turn on.
These three issues can cause you to miss a lot of pictures. So I keep this camera at home for family shots, where its strengths are important. If I'm going out during the day, when lens size and flash aren't important, I bring a smaller camera.
Rating:
Summary: Great Camera from Sony
Review: (...). Here's my review. The image quality is excellent. There is very good color balance. I also like the excellent battery life (This is true for Sony products). It's easy to transfer images to the PC using USB. It has a very good lense (Carl Zeiss). The menu is user friendly. The slight drawback is speed of operation. This may be true for most digital cameras. It's difficult to take good action shots as there is a time lag between shots (when compared to an analog SLR). Bottom line is...Very good value for your money in the 4 MP range.
Rating:
Summary: Love it
Review: I love this camera. I had it for over a year. And I am never with out it. Even my 6 year old can use it. It's the best camera I have had and durable beyond my comphernsion...
Rating:
Summary: Excellent camera
Review: I just purchased this camera for my parents--they're currently using a 2.0 MPixel camera and it's just time for them to "move up." I've owned six digital cameras (dating back to 1999) and I can say that this camera is as good as any I've owned. Image quality is excellent, battery life is adequate (I imagine that it could be improved by using an external flash). Newer 4 MPixel cameras may be a bit faster and cheaper, but many don't have much in the way of optics. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Not perfect, but very good.
Review: I'm a pretty experienced photographer. It was my major in college, and at times I've had to do it for a living. The Sony s85 will yield good, sharp prints up to 8x10". It may go larger, but I've never tried it. As with any digital camera, you'll get better prints by taking them into Photoshop and setting the levels and color balance. Right out of the camera, your photos will look quite a bit better if you use aperture prioity with the one-touch white balance. The Zeiss lens is good and sharp, fast, and has good bokeh (meaning that out of focus areas, like the background, are pleasing to look at). I wish it would stop down farther than f8, but nothing's perfect. The lens seems to perform well throughout its range of apertures and focal lengths. It has a little distortion at the wide end, but I can usually live with it. Construction of the camera is very solid except for the little door on the side of the camera. Mine's about to break off, but I don't care about stuff like that. If you do, be careful not to drop it with the little door open, like I did. The controls on the camera are very intuitive and easy to navigate. I never have read the manual. The battery life on the s85 is amazing. I almost always have the LCD on, yet I never have run out of power. There is one area in which this camera is seriously lacking: speed. It takes a little too long for the camera to boot, and I've missed a few shots that way. Mainly, though, the problem is the shutter lag. If you really know how to use the camera, you can get around it by shooting wide shots in full manual mode. That way it will fire the shutter reasonably quickly upon demand. Still, if I know my subject's is potentially moving, I will put this camera down and grab another. It's also a little noisy in the blue channel at the higher ISO's. That's normal for a consumer digital, though. If you can, shoot with it set to 100.
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