The macro performance is pretty good, I took a coupld of pictures last night extremely close up of my monitor with macro mode and they weren't too bad at all. Some pictures of coins / keyrings also.
It has 3x optical zoom, and i've disabled digital zoom completely already as i've been told in the past how poor and pointless digital zoom is.
I can take a picture about a second after I turn it on, it was one of the selling points in the reviews I read before buying it, aswell as (quite sad I know but) the fact I thought it looked nice and was really small
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Not sure what the magnifying glass mode is, i've not really read the manual yet and the camera isn't with me, im going away for the weekend and taking the cam so i'll play and up some photos when I return, thanks for the input
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Oh and I appreciate it's not brilliant, just didn't want to spend too much money on something I might not really enjoy doing.