well i've done a lot of research on this and this is what i've learned. for $450, you might be able to get a nikon coolpix 800 for around that, after the $75 rebate. Its got slow download speeds, so you'd need to invest another $20-30 for a card reader. You could probably get a olympus d490 zoom, or a canon s10 (with the optional battery and charger) for around that also. The canon has USB already, the olympus doesnt, but you'd still need to buy accessories, the olympus has a better zoom out of those, but i think the nikon would be better for macro and stuff. The canon is nice since its smaller and looks nicer, but thats probably not that important. And as for chad, who wants to take pics of his family, get the s100 elph, its $370 after coupon at buy.com, good point and shoot cam, you might want to consider the fuji finepix 2400 also (3x zoom, little better ISO 125 than the canon (iso 100), uses normal AA batteries, but its bigger). I've got the s100 elph, and well for a student its probably the best thing since its credit card size, 1.1 inch thick. I think the finepix 2400 is around $360 at onvia.com. Any of those more manual control ones that i said were better for puublishing could probably be used for taking pictures, but the cheaper, smaller ones you'd probably like more unless you wanted more versatility. I've had 3 cameras, fuji mx-1200 , epson photopc 800, and now canon s100 elph. the first two had no zoom, and believe me you want a ZOOM. Also you might want to go with compact flash in general, since it seems to be a little bit more supported than smartmedia (the fuji's and the olympuses are smartmedia BTW). Also dont get tricked into buying anything under 2 megapixels if you want to make prints... and the dc215 is not a good idea, even though a lot of people buy it
oh yeah if one of you wants a really good decked out, but used fuji mx-2900 with a ton of accessories, check this
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