How do you know an optical image stabilizer is working? I discovered its power as I was driving down the road the other day and happened to notice my odometer was about to roll to the magically uniform number 33333. I grabbed the FX7 sitting in the cup holder, turned it on and, without taking my eyes off the road, took a single shot of the dashboard. It was my one chance, since the number had rolled on by the time I got home. Fortunately, the shot turned out clear and well aligned, without a hint of the haste and clumsiness surrounding it. The stabilizer is also good in low-light settings; though some of my darker shots had more noise than I like to see, none had the streaks and double visions common in shots with longer shutter delays.

The camera has a well-planned external interface: a selector wheel for shooting modes, a trigger-type zoom control on the front edge and quick-access review and trash buttons on the back, so you can make speedy decisions about the fate of each photo. Despite its multitalented auto shooting mode, there's also a collection of de-rigueur scene presets, things you've heard before like Portrait, Sports, Night Scenery, Fireworks, Party and — my favorite — Snow. What's cool is that even after you've switched back to automatic or even turned off the camera, it remembers which special preset you used last.

The icing on this camera's cake is, ostensibly, the 2.5-in. LCD on the back. Among the largest found on cameras, it does make it easy to set up shots and review pictures. However, it is noticeably low in resolution. With 114,000 pixels, it's only got about half of the pixels that the same-sized LCD screen on Sony's Cyber-shot DSC-T1 has. The end result is that, even though you can peruse the pictures you've shot, you won't always be sure which ones are worth keeping until you download them to your computer.

If cost weren't a factor, I'd say everyone should go out and take a look at this camera. Because of its button design and straightforward handling, it's foolproof in ways that other cameras — even Sony's T1 — are not. But I think its price is too high: the best $400 compact camera shouldn't cost $500.