Admittedly I did buy this camera for it's brilliant sleek design, but I'm fairly disappointed with it. I assumed nowadays and with a company like Sony, image quality would be consistently acceptable for all of their models; no. Out in the sunshine it's an acceptable camera, with fluorescent indoor lights it seems hit and miss but any conditions less than bright and the image quality seems to be jaw-droppingly terrible. If you manually set the ISO much lower than is sensible the noise does clear up, but then that's not at all ideal. The LCD screen is also a bit of a letdown. As the manual says "some tiny black and/or bright dots (white,red,blue or green) may appear on the LCD screen. These dots are a normal result of the manufacturing process and do not affect the recording", Christmas has just gone by and I don't want my pictures looking like decorated Christmas trees. This as well as the fact that when previewing pictures on the camera, the images seem to be compressed awkwardly, means every time I take a picture I'll also have to preview it on a PC (which entirely defeats the original point of digital cameras).
It's not all bad though. The camera can be turned just by pulling the lens cover down, and the camera is quite speedy when starting up. That means you can take it out your pocket and have taken a picture in 2-3 seconds. This means you can do some Clint Eastwood photography, snapping all the embarrassing moments.
Overall the camera just seems to be one made for taking pictures of people, there's so many face focusing features it's a bit difficult to just take a straight shot of an object. I can imagine taking it out to a party or something like that, but then again it's rubbish in low light. So...a picnic? I suppose if you're going on a picnic this would be the perfect camera. :)