Shoot Raw! Expose to the right and try http://www.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/ (no, no referral link, they don't have them *sigh*, but simply the best raw converter in terms of image quality I know of) Hope that helps, SY

I have the slightly older model the S9500. Great camera for the money, but not quite up to the quality of my Canon SLR's.  I particularly like the 28 mm wide angle and tilting LCD screen, which are very useful.

I have quite a number of images from this camera accepted on the various Microstock sites. However, I seldom upload the full 9 MP image from this camera. I always downsize the images to avoid rejections for noise or artifacts. Landscapes from this camera at 100% look particularly bad.  I have tried shooting RAW with it, but in my opinion RAW is not very practical on this camera.  In RAW the camera is very slow and the files are huge compared to my Canon RAW files.   I shoot jpeg with all the settings on the default values and only use ISO 80.  Alter tweaking the color saturation and sharpening in PS I downsize the image to 5-6 MP and apply a small amount of noise reduction in the uniform areas (like sky) with NeatImage.  After this I have a perfectly usable image for Microstock.

Here is one example of an image from this camera demonstrating the value of the wide end of the zoom lens:

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-3551917-ghost-crab-ocypode-sp-on-the-beach-at-sunset-mozambique-southern-africa.html