You do know this site right? http://dpreview.com/

I second the recommendation to look at www.dpreview.com. Then look at the Canon Powershot cameras - I have bought a number of them for family and school use and they are great. Small - strong - and feature rich.

Anti-shake is good, although it doesn’t work if people in the picture are moving. I also specifically chose a camera with the 28mm wide angle range; not all cameras have that. Olympus cameras have good color reproduction, which for me was an important factor. Some camera review websites have downloadable sample photos, which I would encourage you to download and take to your developer and then compare the prints rather than going mental over pixels on the screen.

I have a 5 year old 3mp Canon Powershot. It was great, but I figured it was time for an upgrade.

Got talked into a Sony cybershot 7mp camera.

I hate it.

Hate it, hate it, hate it.

HATE IT!

Cappy interface, crappy image quality. CRAPPY connection to my Macbook.

Since then, I’ve done enough research to safely feel that the best advice for any digital camera is simply: “canon”...at least at the consumer/prosumer levels.

dpreview is great.

I have had 4 digicams. First was a 3 MP Olympus which I just loved but it was bulky. Then I got a 4 MP Canon Elph which I didn’t like because you couldn’t set it so the flash was on off. It busted after 2 years. I currently have two. One is a Canon S80 which is a fantastic camera (and no longer available) but not that tiny. I brought it to the beach once however and a grain of sand lodged in the mech. The sand worked itself out (thank god) but as a result I ordered from eBay a used Panasonic/Leica 5 MP to toss around. It’s a sweet little camera but no viewfinder and a grainy display (improved in the newer Panasonics). The pics are fine, but the display looks like they just enlarged a 2” to 2.5” without increasing the resolution.

My father has that 7MP Sony and it is a ridiculous camera - 4 clicks to delete a photo!

Problem is, no camera yet has all the features I want in the right package. Anti-shake is very good, they all have big screens and at least 3x zoom. I think the lens is key, which is why I’d stick with Canon, Panasonic (Leica lens) or Sony (Zeiss). I don’t think Nikons have anti-shake yet, and I think the Canon Elphs are much better now than they were when I had mine a few years ago. Touchscreen menus seems like a bad idea to me because of fingerprints on the display, but some people find the controls too small.

One of my beefs is that a lot of them don’t have an optical viewfinder anymore. I still use that in bright light.

So... my advice is to isolate the two or three features most important to you - size, viewfinder, manual capabilities, aspect ratio, etc. Narrow down your search to a few, and then go mess around with them in a camera store. Definitely figure out how to delete a photo before you buy because you’ll want to be able to do that easily. Also see how to switch modes. And the ability to view your pix without having to actually turn on the camera (and extend the lens) is nice. My Canon S80 has a separate button for that, it’s not on the mode dial, I like that.

Another beef with the Elph I had was that the on/off button was right next to the shutter and I can’t tell you how often I shut the camera off instead of taking a pic. Dunno if they’ve fixed that on the current Elphs.

I’ll second the recos for the Canon Powershot line: I bought an A540 (now discontinued) a year ago and love it. Nice interface with my Mac, reasonably intuitive software, and the Basic manual will have you up and shooting within 15 minutes.

The only negative I can think of off-hand is that it doesn’t take pictures in RAW format, but JPG.

(edit: and one of the reasons I bought it was because it does have a real viewfinder. I think only Canon still has them for point-and-shoots, but not on the ELPHs)

The new Nikon coolpix have image stabilization. I haven’t seen them but the earlier coolpix were awesome. The dp review advice was good.

PS..I very badly want a Canon 5d.

Sharon