Having owned digital cameras for nearly 10 years now, I'm no stranger to them. I currently own a somewhat old Sony 5mp "prosumer" camera (which still takes very nice photos) and an 8mp Canon DSLR. Since the latter weighs nearly 4 lb. with my favorite lens on it and the former is not exactly compact either, I went shopping for a reasonably good quality and not too expensive pocket camera. After reading some reviews I was interested in a Fujifilm J10, which while inexpensive seemed pretty decent and got good marks for image quality. I treked down to a local Best Buy to check it out. While the J10 does look like a very nice camera for the money, I was not quite enthused about what I perceived as a sluggish response, and the camera buttons seemed a bit clunky. I decided while I was there to look around at other brands and models while I was there. That was when the Kodak M1033 caught my eye. I thought it was a very attractive looking camera. Part of this was due to the fact that it had little in it's finish that would attract finger prints ... something that drives me crazy. Upon picking up the camera I then noticed it was a Kodak and was a little surprized. To be honest, I've not perceived Kodak cameras as being of particular quality or performance. Upon playing with the controls I was immediately impressed with the build quality and the feel of the buttons. Discovering the joystick control ... I was off to the races. Most of the camera operation was fairly intuitive and I found the joystick a much more convinient selection method than the multi-way controls used in most pocket cameras. I was also impressed by the quick responses of the camera ... start-up time, shutter lag, magnification and image scrolling on playback were all quite good, particularly by pocket camera standards. I decided to wait and research the camera some more and then once I found out about the HD video modes with MPEG-4 compression, I decided to give it a try. After several days of using the camera, I'll say that overall I'm fairly impressed with it. The image quality doesn't compare with my DSLR but even though shots in low light are frequently a bit noisy and blurred (again, by DSLR standards), they look pretty good compared to other pocket cameras I've seen reviewed. With 10mp you can afford some blurriness which you'll never see unless you enlarge quite a bit. While full manual modes are not present on this camera, it does give some manual control and has several features that surprized me on this type of camera (spot metering and histogram to name two). On one hand the high ISO settings can make for pretty blotchy and/or noisy images, but again, I've seen far worse in camera reviews of shirt pocket cameras and I must say I'm surprized that these images seem usable even at such high settings. I'm just a bit embarrassed to admit that I've grown accustomed to shooting most of my shots in fully-automatic "dummy" mode. I can't complain about the results and should I need a little more control, to some extent I have it. All in all I'd have to give this little bugger a big thumbs up.