Hi all,

I'm new to the forum, but I've been following closely the A650 threads. I've had an A80 for years which I'd waited to upgrade, and finally the 650 had what I had been waiting for. Mine arrived yesterday and this morning I eagerly went out for a walk to test it out.

Much to my disappointment, I found extremely serious and weird-looking banding problems. Since also contacted Canon about it, instead of embedding the images in this thread I put them up on Picasa:

http://picasaweb.google.com/fdo.perez/A650Problems

Those are smaller resizes of the originals, but I can put up the full 12MP originals if someone wants to analyze them in more detail.

Any ideas, suggestions? Just bad camera? I'm more worried that it's a firmware bug and that replacing this particular camera won't help much.

I should note that other images I shot (trees, skies, etc, I was walking in a park near my house) were all OK. I only saw this nasty issue with the flower closeups.

I'm totally puzzled and seriously disappointed, since I was *extremely* excited with the camera. While the build quality and ergonomics is poorer than on the A80, the feature and lens improvements are very substantial and I was really looking forward to enjoying it. Even worse, in a few weeks I leave for a vacation in Europe and I *really* want to use this camera there, but with this image problem, I feel like I simply can't trust it.

Thoughts, ideas? Thanks in advance!

Fernando.