I'm often asked for advice on setting the eight "My Mode" settings available in these cameras. This is not a "one size fits all" situation, and the solution depends on your needs and preferences.

Still, after the first three months of using the '5050, I settled down on eight sets of parameters which I found most useful, at least for my own usage. After more than a year with the camera, I not only keep the settings (with minor refinements), but I'm also using them on the newer C-5060WZ.

The table below shows these settings for presets #1..4. I'm keeping #5..8 dedicated to quick, manual-focus shooting (see a separate article on this subject).

My presets shown here have been assigned to the most typical shooting situations — most typical for me, that is: outdoors without flash, indoors with, night street, and tabletop macro. At some time you may decide to reassign some of them to what fits your needs.

Remarks:

1. You cannot set the focal length in the "Super Macro" mode (#4); the camera fixes it at about 59 mm EFL.
2. In the night mode (#3) you may choose to set the exposure compensation to -0.3 or -0.7; this works best for me at least.
3. In the "Auto" means practically ISO 64 — the camera almost never chooses anything higher than the lowest setting. The '5060 modes of its baseline 80 ISO somewhat more easily under gloomier conditions.
4. When shooting outdoors I prefer to keep the flash off, and to use forced fill explicitly only.
5. The "On" setting indoors (#2) is really "Red Eye".
6. The "Night" preset is intended mostly for brightly lit city streets. This is the only preset in which I have the noise reduction feature activated by default, and the white balance is set to "Sunny" (yes!).
7. All these presets have Sharpness at -2, Contrast at -1, and Saturation at +1. Although I found these settings reasonable, your taste may differ.

On focal length setting: Looks like the focal length setup is not so easy to find, as I'm still getting emails asking how do it. The complete sequence (an example) is:

Mode Menu > Setup > My Mode Setup > Custom > My Mode 3 > Zoom > 80 mm

Now, this should leave no doubts...

Additionally, my setup is also customized in two other aspects:

• The custom button (on the top right of the camera body) switches between "My Mode" presets;
• The three available positions on the initial shortcut menu are assigned to ISO, white balance, and image quality.