Here are my first hours impressions. (to be followed by a full review)

(Click for larger image)

Design: First impressions of the F505 are, wow small, then wow weird, then wow, nice (in that order). It's MUCH smaller than these pictures make out, to show that I've taken a side by side of the F505 and its no-zoom sibling the F55.

It fits nicely into the hand, majority of the weight coming from that big lens, all the controls are at your fingertips, the screen (back) side of the camera swivelling up to face you on a tight well-built swivel joint.

Operation: Camera operation is fast, even writing to the memory stick is considerably faster than I've previously experienced, menu system is very similar to that found on the F55 and FD-88 with lots of added functionality (I'll go into that in more depth in the review). Overall it feels and operates very well. Nice 5x zoom in playback and smooth scrolling (neat "cropping" feature which allows you to crop a 640x480 portion from your high res image). Nice quick image review by hitting the right hand cursor in capture mode. Good location of macro, whitebalance and spot meter buttons right there on the lens barrel.

Image Quality: Ah, the crux of the matter. So far so good, although I've not really shot enough pictures to be really confident on giving any kind of opinion, having only had the camera for about four hours.

Some Samples: Please no comments, they're not my best but just a snippet of whats to come, I'll be working on the review flat out and hope to have it up next week.