Richard,  sorry if you took offense, it is hard to transmit nuance of tone
without resorting to emoticons. I didn't use an exclamation point, as that
would have driven the message stronger (imho) that you were incorrect.

Yes, the optical zoom is much better than just the high number of pixels. We
have a professional (retired) photographere here in our local computer club.
When the Olympus C-2500 came out (2 meg, but good lens), he sold all of his
35 mm equipment. He claims if you take the pics at high res, the resolution
at 8x10 prints is not detectible in difference from 35mm. Of course, wall
size
or billboards require a little better resolution. Our previous camera was a
1.1
megapixel and it's highest resolution was not as good as the mid-resolution
on
this one. There is a significant difference in printed quality between the
two.
On screen, the difference is harder to see without blowing up the
pictures -- of
course, if you use one for wallpaper, it is significantly larger than the
original
size, but resolution for on-screen viewing is fairly low.

I ended up with the same camera, despite a 10x optical zoom from the same
company (plus 2.5 digital zoom, which I didn't care about), due to two
things:

1) this camera can be ran manually, so you can override the computer when it
does things you don't want to do.

2) there are two macro settings built in, allowing me to get within just a
few
inches of a subject, zoom in and fill the frame entirely with one bee or
flower.

Most of the others on the market cannot focus under 12-18 inches and those
that
accept additional lenses are at the far high end of the price scale. We
considered
the Mavica, along with one that recorded directly to CD-R, but decided
against both.
The biggest drawback for us was in the time to record a picture. However,
for many
usages, this would not be a problem. I think the Mavica is a fine camera;
it's just
a shame that Sony tied it to the 3.5" diskette format. At the same size,
they could
have used the LS-120 technology and been way ahead of the storage curve.
Now, you
can get smart media up to 512MB in size or use the multi-gigabyte
microdrives in the
high-end systems. The other big drawback is the limitation to 640x480 for
storing
non-compressed images -- this is due to the storage medium.