Buying a new digital camera. Recommendations?

Try
Canon - PowerShot 10.0-Megapixel Digital Camera

Here is a link to some test results of travel cameras. Some may be bigger in size than you want but you could start here. Most of the major name brands will have a good p&s that will work just fine for you. You could go to a local camera store and handle the cameras and see what feels good and then research user reviews and ask owners on sites such as dpreview for opinions.

http://dpreview.com/news/1006/10061603travelzoomgrouptest.asp

this is a great resource for decision-making about cameras!

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm

For $200 price range, my recommendation is quick. Go to Costco and purchase the Canon Powershot SD 1300. It's $199, has great resolution, is small and takes excellent pictures with ease. Plus it is very easy to use. Like any small camera it suffers in very low light, but it's a great compact camera value. You won't be disappointed.

Pete

Thirding the rec for the Canon PowerShot. You can even be thrifty and buy a used one off eBay -- I'm still using one I bought 3 years ago and it still takes gorgeous pictures. Canon makes a darn good camera.

THIS thread is fairly recent and you might find it useful.

Last year I got a Panasonic Lumix LZ10.
It's an excellent camera. Uses standard AA batteries and SD memory cards.

The lens limits the quality of photographs you can take. I've always found Canon and Nikon to make the best lenses, and give me the best pictures.

For point and shoots the features I look for are a large display (for composing, viewing and deleting photos), some motion/vibration reduction, long battery life (lots of pictures between charges), quick shutter release (I can't stand it when you have to wait for the shutter to release after you push the button), and a reasonable variety of shooting modes (museum, portrait, fireworks, macro for shooting closeups of small items, etc.).

Optical zoom is a big deal. My first digital had 3x and was clearly not enough. My second had 5x and worked pretty well for most applications. My third had 7x and was still better. My current has 10x wide angle zoom and I love it.

I pretty much ignore megapixels. Anything over 5 is plenty and it's hard to find a camera without at least 8 these days.

Be sure to buy plenty of memory. You can conserve memory by editing your pictures as you go (deleting the ones that aren't that great) but you will still want lots of memory so you don't have to save shots for later. It's so much better to take pictures of whatever you want and sort them out when you get home - that's why digital is head and shoulders better than film in my book.

Costco is a good place to purchase your camera. I recently had the flash control switch stop working at just over 90 days from purchase and Costco allowed me to return it. I was able to buy a new camera rather than mailing the old one off for repairs (under warranty, but I would still have to wait). Costco has a sale on memory cards right now too.

I just bought one on qvc. I read the reviews there, as well as on amazon. I picked one that was on 5 easy pays as well. :)

I absolutely love my Panasonic ZS-3!!!! Fabulous pictures, long zoom. Costco has the new version for $239 now with case and memory card.

Canon Powershot - I love mine, it's small enough to fit in my coat or jean pockets so its not always on display, yet easy to whip out, and I also enjoy that it has a viewfinder for those times when the sun makes it diffacult to see the screen.