Poertner,
I'm very happy with the camera, although they do have a 3.2 megapixel version out with a 1 second start up time. The battery life isn't too bad but with all of these units using the screen to take pictures runs the battery down pretty quick. Using the viewfinder only it has one of the best battery life spans ever. Really quite impressive. The menus all function like drop downs, something like windows start menu. You use the zoom button and forward and back buttons (used to view the photos) to navigate the menu. It also has a limited 35 second movie record function + sound (.mov). I remember seeing a panasonic camera the same size that actually only limited the movie that it could record by the amount of available memory which would have been a nice extra feature.
The optics are mounted vertically in a strange periscope arrangement. I've read some reviews that aired worries about the image losing clarity by being reflected down the "periscope" but having seen many digital pictures taken by fuji, canon and other makes of more standard design units, I'd have to say I haven't noticed any problems with the image quality.
I have 128mb card in the camera just now. Full quality 1600x1200 pictures limit me to ~20 pictures, but to the other end of the range, the smallest resolution on economy mode allows about 1000+ photos. Usually I sit one down from the highest quality setting and resolution (12which allows over 100 photos.
Feature wise it has a reasonable selection of flash options from nighttime, standard, red eye reduction, none. Has a timer, can set it to take continuous pictures (hold button down to keep taking pictures). You can add audio comments about each photo, use it to record up to 30 mins of sound (depending on memory card used). There are probably other functions that I haven't used but I'm not a tremendous photographer, I just needed something compact to help me get into it. All the pictures of my PC and others are taken with this camera, unfortunately since I don't have my own server they are usually resized in paintshop pro to meet upload restrictions so may lose some quality/definition. For some samples of a poor quality cameraman taking pictures check out my pc photos
here
Here's a link to the new and improved version of my camera the Xi
http://www.dimage.minolta.com/xi/index.html
And the even newer Xt with extended movie function (looks even slicker too)
http://www.dimage.minolta.com/xt/index.html
Poertner if you have any other questions of want some full quality samples PM or mail me and I can mail you some pics...