I am on day 3 of using this camera and I love it. I took a 3-hour hike yesterday shooting all the way, and have really gotten to know it. I downloaded all the shots last night and am really happy with them. The amazing thing is how sharp the 30X pictures are when hand held. I’ve attached a pic that I took at 30X and I hope Amazon saves the full resolution, because it shows the crispness of the detail possible in a hand held 30X pic. It’s due to the well-designed image stabilization, and great sensor, (and great optics). Because the image stabilization is so good even through the viewfinder, it is not hard to compose the long-range shots—the viewfinder image is not jerky even at 30X.Some people say they don’t need a 30X zoom, they say that it’s a just a gimmick or only needed for long nature shots. But even if you are simply taking pictures on the street, when you are looking for great shots, it’s amazing the variety of new subjects you can obtain simply because you can reach further from where you are standing. Go for the long zoom, you will use it constantly.Battery life if very long. I took 140 shots yesterday, and the battery was still at 3 full bars afterward. I did buy the BM extra battery kit shown on this amazon page ($19) just in case.The EFV (electronic view finder) is also a main reason to get this camera. I wear reading glasses (reluctantly) and I hate having to put them on every time I want to take a shot. With other cameras, and with my iPhone 7, I’d have to fumble my reading glasses out of my pocket for each shot. With a good EFV like this, you don’t need to do that. Rather, just set the diopter focus once to match your eyes, and you can leave your reading glasses behind. The EFV on this camera is as good as ones on much more expensive cameras. Smaller of course, but very good.Controls: I’ve owned a lot of high-end cameras, and this is my simplest yet. If you stick to Ai mode, this is a simple point-and-shoot camera. But there is a lot of depth below the surface with all the extra settings that are possible. I also own a Lumix DMC-FZ2500, and the power of this smaller camera is comparable in many ways. Of course, this ZS50 camera is more limited than that amazing (but huge) FZ2500 camera; but for on-the-go shots, the ZS50 has all I need. I especially like the manual focus ring, it’s useful for some closeup shots where you want to carefully pick what’s in focus.Also regarding controls, even if you primarily want a point and shoot camera, I do recommend you learn the other settings for this camera (study the manual). That’s because, as many reviewers here have said, the powerful controls are easy to change in your pocket without knowing you did it. So it’s helpful to be able to identify what setting you put it in accidentally, so you can put it back to where you want it. I just take a quick glance at the upper left corner of the screen/viewfinder before each new set of shots; that tells me if I jiggled the controls or not.Size and weight: this camera fits easily in the front pocket of my blue jeans. Very light. I’ve had even smaller cameras, (my 20-year-old Canon PowerShot Elph for example), and if all you want is a tiny and simple point and shoot you might do better with something that size and power. But with the extra power this camera has, I can’t imagine controlling it in a smaller form factor.The camera powers up very quickly, which is good if you are on the go and pulling the camera in and out of your pocket for quick shots.I initially considered getting one of the newer models in this line (ZS60, ZS70), those with a 20M image capacity (and 4K video), but after my research I feel I picked the right model with the ZS50. If you read all the reviews of this camera here on Amazon, you will read from a number of people who tried out the newer models and found the image quality to be worse on the newer ones, and came back to this one. I think that must be due to the sensor. By now you know Panasonic used a lower pixel density sensor on this camera, which means each pixel is larger at the fixed sensor size of this line. I suspect that’s what makes the difference. I have cameras with much higher pixel density, but I don’t miss them. At 12.1M, this camera is perfect for me since I usually only view the image on a screen. The biggest images I display from it are on a 4K image wall-mounted TV. That requires a 9M sized image so the match is great. If I were cropping images in Photoshop and actually printing large photos from them, I’d use a camera with a higher pixel density.By the way, like many Lumix cameras, you can digital zoom beyond the 30X optical limit, but I tried that and the pics I took with that were not sharp. Stick with the optical 30X zoom.So to wrap it up, I needed a good pocket camera that was simple but had lots of hidden power, had an EFV, and a high-quality long zoom, and this is it. And by the way, since it’s a two-year old model, today’s price is great too.