FZ18 two questions

I tested the FZ18 at Costco this weekend and I came away with two questions.

Does the intelligent ISO actually work? I tried comparing the I-ISO against manual adjusting the ISO and the manual ISO seemed to produce better results.

The RAW mode seemed to take at least 5-8 sec to write to the internal memory. Will using a SDHC card will improve the write times?

Overall the camera seemed to be easy to use and well built and from the images I’ve seem on this forum the camera would be a good replacement for my broken C8080.