I was really undecided on whether or not to get this. I have a HP Photosmart 945 which is a decent but not great camera, and had recently gotten a DXG flash "camcorder" for shooting home movies and whatever. Some of my indecision was all the higher end cameras like this one use compact flash memory and proprietary batteries, while the "consumer" models get by on SD cards and AA's, rechargeable or otherwise. SD cards are darn cheap, and AA's are everywhere.
However, I really felt the limitations of the 945, the worst for me being very slow writing to the memory no matter how fast a card I used. It eventually came down to this or a Rebel XT. From the sample pictures I've seen the Rebel is a better camera, but it's much more expensive and to really take advantage of it you need to buy extra lenses. Plus, I had to admit to myself I'm not a professional photographer.
The selling points to me on the A200 were the anti-shake mechanism and an advertised movie mode of 30fps. I was a little skeptical of the movie mode, as the 945's "movie" was something like 233X200 at about 15-20 fps and poor quality, and I didn't expect much better.
So I ordered one and UPS delivered it a few days later. At first feel I thought I'd made a mistake, the A200 is plastic and feels like it. It's real little, much smaller than I expected. The manual zoom is just a sliding cylinder...I thought I'd bought a very expensive plastic toy. That is until I took the lens cap off, and thought, "That's a nice piece of glass."
To shorten my next few days the A200 is capable of great shots, but you can still take lousy ones if you're not careful. The focus and detail in the pictures are fantastic, as well as the color. But it does take time to learn to adjust the settings. While it does have an auto setting it's not a generic point and click, and you're wasting your money if that's how you take pictures. While the manual zoom felt cheap at first, now I positively love it over the push-a-button zoom most cameras have.
I was initially disappointed with the anti-shake, and wondered if it was even working. It will enable better quality pictures in dim light down to about three shutter speed settings below what you could otherwise. Setting my shutter speed on manual I got down to about 1/15 of a second. Telephoto shots in daylight is where it really shines, just remember to use the spot focus in the center of the image (normally it's predictive) and they'll come out sharp.
The movie mode, however, blew me away. I got the little DXG mostly because I could take movie clips of any length, and was willing to live with mediocre quality at 320X240. It has a very limited light range where it gets good results. The A200, however, is like going from grainy first generation videotape to HDTV, it's that much better. The movie length may "only" be about 10-15 minutes per clip, but unless you're putting your camera on a tripod and filiming an entire event, do you really need to take clips that long? The A200 lets you edit clips in-camera, and comes with movie editing software, plus for Mac users it saves to quicktime format. One caveat is to turn off the autofocus, otherwise the little typewriter noises will drive you nuts.
The only real weaknesses I've seen in this camera is the indoor white balance for natural light photos has to be manually set to tungsten, otherwise the pictures have a marked yellow cast. This to me is a minor problem as it takes two seconds to adjust it. What is very annoying to me is how small many of the buttons and controls are. In particular the main function ring, which has a control button in the center, makes it hard for me to press that button without activating something else instead. However, this seems to be the trend in cameras as they're all getting very-very small.
Overall for people wanting more than the average camera, but not wanting to go to all the expense of a DSLR, or wanting to combine a camera with a decent camcorder, this is a great buy.