For her birthday, Maria became the proud and happy owner of a 5.1megapixels Canon PowerShot SD450 Digital Elph (Ixus 55 in Europe) with a 1Gig SD card x40. It's a superb digital camera. Almost perfect. The assisted auto-focus is incredibly powerful. The spot program is probably the best I've seen in a digital camera. It boots in less than a second, and is ready after a photo in half a second, thanks to the high-speed memory card. It can shoot in B&W, and even my Canon Digital Rebel (EOS300D in Europe) cannot do that. It has a simple and intuitive UI, with a lot of powerful and cool settings. One charge of the battery lasts so long that I still don't know exactly how long! The builtin flash is excellent for portraits, of course a bit weak for more than that. The image viewer is superb, and automatically switches orientation. DPOF, PictBridge, everything. And the pictures' quality make me feel I am a good photographer. Wow. Really wow.