I received my SX260 last Wednesday and have taken about 700 shots and a few quick 5 minute video. Without writing a novel, here are the high/low points of this unit. In addition to this unit, I also purchased a couple of aftermarket batteries (and after market A/C adapters for about $5.00 each) for about $5.00 each and the batteries work fine. With the battery (original and aftermarket) I was able to get over 300 shots (50% flash) with zooming and playback and the battery meter still showed about 25% charge remaining.

Pro's
Zoom - very long for a subcompact camera 20x optical, total 81x combined (yes 81 times!)
Image Stabilizer - Excellent (far superior than the DSC-HX9V); Even at 81x the picture did not come out of focus, but of course not as sharp. I think it's still acceptable
Scenes - A few scenes; I think the portrait, sepia, B/W works real well (the Portrait+ suppose to blur the picture a bit, but it's not to my liking) It has a few effects (fish eye,... Read more

Canon SX260 HS: I'm happy to say that I was one of the first people to buy this camera. I bought it from one of the sellers on Amazon Marketplace, before it was officially released (it wasn't even available on amazon.com itself when I bought it).

It's a good camera & quality clear pictures, with a clear & sharp LCD screen.

The camera has the option of changing the aspect ratio for the pictures; you could choose from 16:9, 4:3, 3:2 & 1:1. You could also change the amount of recording pixels from L, M1, M2 & S. In auto mode, it has many predefined scenes. The camera could also be set to various scene modes, including portrait, Smooth skin, smart shutter, High-speed Burst HQ, Handheld night scene, low light, underwater, snow, fireworks, discreet & stitch assist. It does not have the scene modes for Kids & pets, foliage or beach, which other Canon powershot cameras have, but I don't think that would make a big difference, as it takes great pictures anyway. It also... Read more

I purchased this camera a full month before it was released on Amazon for an upcoming trip to southeast asia. As luck would have it, it arrived the day before my flight took off. I've had good luck with Canon cameras in the past and their picture quality is among the best. The SX260 caught my interest mainly because of the 20x zoom. There are already a couple of reviews going into detail about all of the features so I won't be redundant. Just let me say that there are more features than you will probably use. I will play around with the myriad of shooting modes from time to time, but mostly I will do 99% of my shooting in P mode, tweaking settings as I desire on the fly. I love the GPS feature; I will keep it permanently on so that all of my pics are geo-tagged. The Canon imagebrowser software that comes with the camera will show you the exact location on Google earth where the pic was taken. Pretty cool! I used the movie digest feature during my trip and like it very much. The camera... Read more