While we all have our preferences for the brand of camera to use, i am going to recommend a little different direction for your purchase. Go to your favorite store that sells several different brands of cameras in your price range and pick up each one of them and play with it. Use the controls, are the buttons easy to get to and use. Look at the display, is it large enough to read the menus and see what you are taking a picture of. Are the on screen menus easy to navigate. If possible take a picture with it. I have used a number of cameras (Kodak, Nikon, Canon, and Sony) and in the price range you are looking at and all of them take a fair picture.

If you decide you like going digital this will be your FIRST digital camera.

We have a Nikon, but it has a couple Issues. One is it takes a long time between pictures, the second is the battery door appears to be quite fragile and a chunk of ours it gone already and three the videos it takes are in apple quicktime format which requires a huge download of quicktime and gives tiny grainy videos. CR is not a very accurate source of information. Were thinking of replacing it already and its only a year old.

The AA vs Propritary battery seems to be a personal preference and results in long discussions every time its mentioned. I personally prefer AA powered and wouldn't buy anything but. Then there are others who can write paragraphs about why AA's are not good for cameras.

Also be sure to take plenty of pictures, digital space is cheap. And like anything else make backups.

Turn the resolution up all the way. My SIL keeps turning the resolution on my MIL's camera down to 640x480 so she doesn;t have to wait so long for MIL to transfer her pictures over yahoo messenger! So when MIL sends us a picture we get a little postage stamp size that you can't see anything in. You can always reduce a big picture but you can't enlarge a small picture without loss of quality so keep the res high.
Also do not use the Windows XP picture wizard to transfer your pictures, it has bugs and sometimes results in corrupt EXIF data. EXIF data is information on your pictures which records the date, time, etc that the picture was taken. Thanks to EXIF data you also don't need to turn on the silly feature in cameras that printes the date/time on the pictures, its in the EXIF so don't mess up the pics. You will find that there are programs that can read this data from your pictures and sort them by date and time no matter where they reside on your computer and play them back in order. Its kind of fun sometimes to retrace your steps through history and there are also scripts that can take GPS logs and fill in the location in the picture EXIF data and web sites that can display those pictures in their proper location on a map so you can map out your last hike.
Also don't try to rename pictures, eventually you will find that its a pain to try and think if names for thousands of pictures, leave the name alone and edit the EXIF description or commnet fields. You can choose to display those columns in your file explorer or picture organizing program that way your not trying to cram data into a limited file name field and those quick slideshow programs that order the display by file name will still work.

I've gotten a number of Hewlett Packard refurbished ones for different members of the family. They've always worked flawlessly at about 1/3 of the price of a new one.

When and of what are you primarily going to be taking pictures? These make a HUGE difference on what kind of camera you need. Here are some general comments on camera features

Make sure which options you are comfortable with and which ones you aren't. BTDT My first digital camera had a proprietary rechargeable battery w/ 3x zoom & wrote the files to floppy disks (at the time I was thinking that I can find floppies anywhere but memory cards were hard to find if I filled one up and zoom was limited to 3x). The second one took care of the floppies & proprietary battery. It's only flaw was the picture offset of the view finder. By the third, zooms had progressed to about 10x and a viewfinder w/ LCD display were reasonably priced.

I would start by deciding what type of view finder you want. Go to a store & try the different viewfinders. The display choices near your price range are:

LCD only requires holding the camera well away from your body to take a picture.

Offset view finder (like a 110 or 126) doesn't show a true view of the picture the camera is taking but this is only noticeable when taking a close-up picture. These may also have a through the lens view on the LCD.

Through the lens display in a view finder (small LCD in view finder like an SLR)

My preference is the display in a traditional viewfinder. It will allow you to see what the camera is actually taking when you snap the picture & hold it like a regular camera.

In the $100-200 price range you are probably looking at an offset viewfinder or an LCD only model.

Where you are going to be taking pictures will determine what zoom you need. A 3x zoom is relatively limited to across a large room or less unless you are taking panorama shots outdoors.

Shutter lag isn't a huge deal unless you are taking a picture that requires split second timing (sports or animals, etc.) It's just irritating if you're used to the instant operation of a film camera.

don't by a kodak easyshare unless you want the "AOL" of digital cameras. I used one for work and hated it. the software would highjack my computer and force me or inconvenience me to use it's program for whatever I was doing that included a photo. very annoying.

I personally have a samsung and would recommend them. mine is a digimax 5 megapixel. it is easy to use and the quality is okay. it is like the hyundai of vehicles. not the toyota or honda (fuji, cannon, olympus), but it is decent...

Also, if it comes with a connection to hook it up to your TV, that is a major plus. I use that all the time to preview pics, show off pics, etc...

my $.02

oh yeah, and by all means, buy at least 5 (million) megapixels at the very least. If you are intersted in making 8x10s, and larger, this is very important

Thanks to everyone for the tremendous response so far. To answer one question, the camera will be mostly used for taking still shots of family, various adventures, and, of course, my beloved gear. I am going to go through this thread and make a list of the points and recommendations that have been made and condense it down into a sort of "buyer's guide" prior to heading off to the store. One of my goals is to be able to post shots of my stuff that compare in quality to some of the awesome photos that appear here with some regularity. So keep it comin'!

To be honest, in that price range most of the cameras you look at will be very similar. They will all have some shutter lag, and most of them will probably have similar quality. Unless you start getting in to the more advance and higher priced cameras, will you start seeing a large difference. But that doesn't mean they're all the same. Best way to decide is to physically go and compare them side by side, and decide which one you think is the most user friendly. Once you start getting an idea of what you want, you'll start to find out which ones will stand out.

Some of the main things you might want to consider

1) Resolution - This is how they catagorize most cameras, by how many megapixels it's capable of. There are some general rules as to which size you should get based on your needs. If you will strictly be e-mailing photos or looking at them on a computer, you can get by with 1 MP or less. However, once you start printing them out, you'll want at least 3+ MP. The higher end cameras with 6-10 MP are good for poster size prints. Now even if you don't ever think you'll print pictures that size, don't forget you can use that extra resolution to zoom into one area of a picture and crop the rest, so the larger resolution gives you more options. By deciding how much resolution you need, that narrows down your options quite a bit.

2) Batteries - Either AA or proprietary. Your choice on this, some people like having common AA, some people don't care. The advantage of AA's is commonality, you can find them almost anywhere, but it comes at a price of size and weight. You won't find any really small sized cameras that take AA, the batteries themselves are much bulkier than the specialty batteries. Also, even though they might take AA's, most of the cameras drain regular alkalines really, really fast, so you'll most likely want rechargables. Aftermarket batteries for most cameras are pretty cheap (probably cheaper than AA's) on ebay, so that gives you another options. I've had ok luck with aftermarket batteries, sometimes they work fine, other times, well, I know why they're that cheap. I like the idea of using AA's, but I also like having a more pocketable camera so I'm willing to make the tradeoff.

3) Internal memory - If you can find one with internal memory, it's well worth it. Internal memory gives you a buffer for the pictures, so it doesn't have to wait for each picture to finish writing to your memory card before you shoot the next one. The camera can write to the internal memory much faster than it can write to the memory card, so you can shoot a few pictures pretty quick and save it to the internal memory, and when you're done shooting, it will transfer that data to the memory card at a slower rate.

4) Shutter lag - in that price range, most all of them are going to have shutter lag. It is annoying when you are trying to capture a candid moment, but other than preparing for it, there's not much you can do other than getting a higher priced camera. Some cameras also have a "picture" lag, the time it takes between shots. Internal memory helps with this, as does turning off the flash so the batteries recharge quicker.

5) Zoom - just focus on optical zoom specs, don't even concern yourself with the exaggerated digital zoom specs. By the time you zoom in 50X with digital zoom, you're going to be looking at an unidentifiable mess. Also, anything more than 3X zoom

6) Memory - As someone else mentioned, Sony uses their own brand of memory and batteries, so aftermarket items for their stuff is limited. That means you'll be paying higher for the accessories. Just something to keep in mind.

Once you know what you're looking for, it's a whole lot easier to go to the store narrow your preferences down. Also, before you go to the store, you might want to research a couple of your top choices. Every company has some quirks or problems that you might want to find out. Canon has their E18 error, Nikon has some picture quality problems, and I forgot what problems Sony has. Doesn't mean you'll have those problems, but it's better to know in advance what to expect just in case.

Ducktapeguy,
I liked your itemized thoughts on digicams but I have to disagree with the zoom. You're right, when considering zoom, consider ONLY the optical zoom and forget the digital. However, disregarding more than 3x optical is unecessary. In fact, choosing the absolute highlest level of optical zoom is the way to go.

In Ironraven's situation, where he wants to (among other things) take photos of his adventures, I can forsee nature shots where you can;t get very close to an animal but want the closest "close-up". This is where your zoom (optical) comes in handy. The higher the level of optical zoom, generally speaking, the better the quality of the camera's optics.

Where I work, many years ago (1999) we bought several Sony Mavicas with 14x optical zoom. These were the cameras that wrote to a 3.5 floppy and could be transferred to your computer via the floppy drive. They worked flawlessly at first, but as the years went by, the number of failures to read ffrom the disks got to the point where nobody wanted to use them anymore. However, we needed the zoom capability. Now, 14x is NOT a large zoom factor, but it was better than most on the market at the time. A 3x zoom is, in my opinion, next to worthless.

Another thing to consider are the digi-cams with the SLR 35mm interchangeable lens cameras. That may be the Nikkons discussed earlier, I don;t know. But the benefit is in the interchangeable lenses, and most will take your old 35mm SLR lenses so you don;t have to buy so many. They're expensive, but they give you the broadest range of options available. Definitely NOT for the beginner (or for my modest abilities either), I just mention them so you know they're out there.

Some posters said to compare the cameras side-by-side and I think that's good. WalMart is a good place to start. Their digi-cam section is pretty fair.