Digital camera recommendations?

Knowing next to nothing about photography (I usually use disposables), I'm asking for suggestions for a digital camera in the $100-$200 or so range. Trying to do a comparison online is bewildering to say the least. From my own limited research I understand that "shutter lag" is something to be avoided and image stabilization is a big plus. What are some other important factors to consider? (Bear in mind that the last non-disposable camera I bought was a Kodak 110 Instamatic circa 1978. )

You usually cant go wrong with a Canon. I have a 3.2MP Elph that takes great shots.

Canon and Nikon seem to be the two top rated.
One of the main choices you need to need to make now is AA or proritary battery or not.
You may want to research the flash recharge time, our Nikon 5600 takes 2-3 seconds to recharge the flash which gets annoying after a while.
Also avoid Sony unless you want to get locked in to their stupid memory Stick format and get an overpriced over rated camera.
Also some of the Kodak's can't connect via standard USB, you have to use their silly dock so if your working mobile say from a laptop you would have to carry it around.

We have an Olympus that we have been pretty happy with for the last couple of years. Unless you disable the flash, it does have some shutter lag (or whatever you call it, you push the button, and it takes the pic a second or so later. Makes it hard to get some of those shots you really wanted). It's little screen isn't the biggest in the world, but we live with it. It uses a rechargable battery, so you must carry the charger around on trips, and keep an eye on the battery level, and uses a standard USB cord to connect to our laptop. It came with free software you load into your computer, but most computers can do the same thing without any additional software. The Olympus software does have some features that I like better than the built in to the computer stuff. It uses a standard XD chip, so you can carry additional chips when going on a long trip if you want to. It only has a 3X zoom, we wish it had a little more, alto you can zoom in on it once you get the image into your computer. All in all we are pretty happy with it.

I have not used any of their digitals, but in my film days, I had good luck with anything marked Pentax...

for a good look at all the different types and prices of the different cameras to to. www.tirgerdirect.com and go to the digital camera section. I bought a HP from them and I am happy with the pictures and you get a good transfer program for the pc, it easy to upload to this site, or send e-mail pictures to eanybody.

I just bought a camera in your price range ($200). I'm no photography expert and I was replacing a cheap 5 year old camera, so YMMV.

It was a toss-up between Canon and Nikon until I read some reviews. Among other things, people complained about blurry photos with the Nikon, although it did have a mode where it took ten shots rapid-fire and saved the least blurry one. When I see a work-around like that I know there's a problem!

I ended up with a Canon A540 which seems to be an older model that might not be on the shelves much longer. To my untrained judgement it seems to work pretty well so far.

One thing - count on buying a bigger memory card along with the camera. It seems that none of them come with enough memory for more than a few photos.

Don't buy the memory card with the camera a smost retailers mark up memory cards too much, buy it seperate but buy one. I've stuck a 2G in ours.
You will find plenty of different memory card formats, some standard and some now.
Most popular is SD, then you see CF in some higher end cameras because it can still be faster, then every now and then you kight find one that uses XD thought I thought that format had been discontinued and then you have the Sony which use memory stick.
SD and CF you will find plenty of vendors and sellers, the less popular like XD you may have to hunt for then with Sony you have a half dozen different variations of the Memory Stick that you have to check for compatibilty and you will pay more for since any other company that wants to make a memory stick has to license the format from Sony.

Depends what you need a camera for -- shanps of the family? Nature close-ups? landscapes? Photos of your gear...:)

Consumer Reports likes the nikon coolpic, so thats what I got.

TRO

Good point, Canon lists a 512Meg card for $35, but I bought a premium Lexar card for about $20 at StuffMart. You can get a no-name brand for probably $10.

One thing I noticed was that there seems to be no consistency when it comes to speed. Canon recommends their "high speed" card for taking full 30fps video, but they don't say what that speed is. The various brands ranged from no spec whatsoever, to "60x" to "speed optimized" to "really really fast". No way to compare them between brands and no absolute spec...

Hey norad45!

Check out dpreview.com .

A few things I learned about Digital cameras...

Stick to companies who make cameras (e.g., Cannon, Nikon, etc.) and stay away from companies who build cameras as an addition to their primary products (e.g., Kodak, HP, etc.).

Buy a camera that uses standard batteries. This is especially important if you travel. It's easy to pick up a spare set of AA's or carry 10 spares in your pack, but it's expensive to buy a spare proprietary. Waiting for them to recharge can be maddening if you're missing some photo opps. What if you lose your charger cord? You can still use rechargeable standard batteries for daily use. It's just nice to have convienence and options.

Buy memory cards separate. You can find them ridiculously cheap (compared to retail camera shops) on-line. And you don't have to dig long or buy from tiny, obscure shops. The big box on-line outlets run deals all the time.

This one, I learned the hard way. When buying memory, buy multiple cards in smaller sizes rather than one massive (2G and larger) card. Cards can be damaged, or just develop a random "card error" causing image loss. I'd rather lose part of my trip than the entire thing. Not to say card errors happen often, but they can. It happened to me. I now carry 3 512MB cards, shoot on the highest quality, and never delete a photo until I upload it to my laptop. It may be a slight hassle to carry multiple cards, but I'd rather play safe. It only takes a couple seconds to swap out cards in most cameras. To me, it's worth the peace of mind.

Not all cards are created equal. Buy the best quality cards you can afford. Expensive, name brand cards write much faster. The camera can only write so fast. This is the lag time you experience with most point-and-shoot cameras (higher end have less lag). It may drive you crazy at first, but you get used to it pretty quickly. You don't want to compound the lag time using a slow card if you can avoid it.

Digital cameras are a blast. Instant gratification, print only what you want, mess with your images with one of the many photo editing software applications, and just delete that family photo where Aunt Margo has one eye shut and her tongue hanging out.

Have fun and good luck.

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.

Stretch,

Good catch. Actually, I got interrupted and didn't finish my thought on that one. You're absolutely correct, optical zoom is the only way to go, and you'll never regret having more zoom. What I meant to say was, also anything with more than 3x optical zoom will probably need a tripod or some sort of image stabilization, because it gets harder to handhold and get sharp pictures at those higher magnifications. A lot of people don't realize that the more you zoom, the less light reaches the lens, and the steadier you have to hold the camera. With a lot of the high magnifications on the newer cameras, it's almost impossible to handhold the camera without some type of stabilization, either internal or external.

Right now, I don't know of too many cameras with 14x optical zoom. I am looking at a couple that go up to 12X optical, which would be great for outdoors, but don't forget the other end of the spectrum. While high magnification zooms are always prominently advertised as a selling point, you should also consider the wide end of the lens. Most cameras that I've seen don't really go nearly wide enough for my preference. For group pictures, indoor shots, etc, having a true wide angle (28mm equivilent or better) is probabably more useful than extra magnification. It might not seem that important, but if you go to the store and actually compare a 28mm wide angle to a 35 mm (i'm talking about focal lengths, not films size), you'll realize it does make a pretty big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of cameras only concentrate on trying to outdo each other in zoom, at the expense of the wide angle.

Stick to companies who make cameras (e.g., Cannon, Nikon, etc.) and stay away from companies who build cameras as an addition to their primary products (e.g., Kodak, HP, etc.).

****************************************************************

WHOA! Don't badmouth Kodak. They were making cameras before the CEO's of Canon and Nikon were born (in Japan of course). You can get a good Kodak for under $200 in the 3 MP range which is adequate to make enlargements up to 5 X 7 or larger.

I once owned one of those Kodak film cameras that made panoramic shots (can't remember the name). It finally died and I called Kodak about getting it repaired. Nice lady in customer service said the camera was discontinued and that it was of poor design from the start. Even though the camera was well out of warranty, she instructed me to mail it to her and she would send me the current version, FREE. And she did. This is not the first time I have gotten outstanding service from Kodak, like sending me a small part for my projector, FREE, with her apology.

As someone mentioned, some of their cameras have a charging/transfer dock. This is very handy for some applications. Rather than worry with a portable charger, I just carry an extra battery. Surely they have a compatible system to connect to laptops without packing the dock. Takes outstanding pictures as do most brands of digital cameras. I have an LG cell phone (LG8300)that takes unbelievably good pictures which surprised me greatly. They go on a mini-SD card which slips into the side of the phone.

This is sorta like which is best, Ford, Chevrolet or Dodge pickups. (Chevy diesel of course).

BTW, my Kodak digital camera, Model DX3900, is......<wince>....
made in Japan! It's still a great little camera and easily slips into your shirt pocket (or bra if you have the room). There is literally a plethora of digitals on eBay, some at real bargains new in the box.

My two cents.

Boone

Sorry thseng. Meant to reply to Monkey.

Boone

It seems that digital camera makers are lowering the quality of their optics (thereby reducing the practical amount of optical zoom they can provide) and instead focusing on "digital" zoom, which, as Ducktapeguy pointed out, is not a good thing. The digital zoom does work, but the more of it you apply the more corrupted the photo.

Optical zoom is identified as the first set of characters in the camera's zoom field. 3x/120x means 3x optical zoom and 120x digital zoom. The optical zoom is pure lens capture of your subject. Digital zoom just enlarges the pixels of the photo. The more digital zoom used, the larger the pixels, and the blurrier the image.

With our 14x Sony Mavicas, you didn;t really need a tripod too often. We used them for long-distance photos of license plates, cars, and people. The cameras had image stabilization (which most all do) which did a fair job of taking care of vibrations. That said, if you want the clearest photo using the highest zoom factor, a tripod and timed shutter activation is the only way to do it. This way, you set the shutter to capture say five seconds after you press the button. You press the button and step away and the camera then takes the photo without any interference.

When I began considering replacing the Mavicas, their newest models wrote the images to a CDR and, if I remember correctly, the highest optical zoom had dropped to about 12x or maybe 10x. We didn;t get them and have yet to replace the Mavicas.

About the only way to get a good optical zoom anymore is by looking at the digital SLR cameras. Again, these are the ones with interchangeable lenses that we're accustomed to seeing photographers use for the last several decades. They are true digital cameras with mega-pixel quality, but their lenses are purely optical. They are, by far, the most versatile digi-cams out there that I'm aware of, but they carry a pricetag well above Norad's $200 budget.

I love my Canons. I have two. You can get a Canon Powershot up to 7.1 MP within your price range.

My sister has had a couple of Nikons. The first one she had was pretty cr@ppy. But her current one is really good. I do not know the model though.

The big issue with Kodak is some require the use of a dock.

Hey KyBooneFan,

Did not mean to offend, if offense was taken. My decision to use name examples to clarify my thought was a poor idea. Not to mention Kodak was a poor choice given their incredible history in the photography industry. Lesson learned, and I thank you!

For the record, I do like Kodak and have used their film for years. Still won’t use anything else. I did not mean to imply Kodak was junk or they ran a poor company. The company would not have survived over 100 years if they didn’t do things right. As a side note, my mother owns an entry level Kodak point-and-shoot that takes far better photos in low light than my “nicer” Canon point-and-shoot.

I do, however, stand by my opinion. I will spend my money on a Canon or Nikon before Kodak (at this point in time). I feel the features and function are better thought out. Just my most humble opinion.

m

Monkey,

No offense taken. I am somewhat opinionated myself and at times rankle some people.

I just wanted to point out Eastman Kodak's longevity and their great customer service. I really can't imagine calling Canon or Nikon and getting a sympathetic customer service rep.

Way back in the fortys, we had an old Kodak which was quite heavy and had a door that opened. Then you reached in and got a hold of a bellows apparatus that slid forward on a track. We called it our "Kodak". At that time any camera brand was a Kodak although there weren't many other brands. I don't know when the old Argus C-3 came about but it was the industry standard for a long time.

Like everyone calls all circular saws "Skill Saws" when in fact only a Skil saw is a Skil saw.

Boone

For my hiking trips and everyday life I'm using CASIO Exilim EX S3 for several years (I've ordered it from Japan). At 3.2MP it's a _real_ point-and-shoot camera. No zoom, no focus to worry about (and thus a much more serious battery life - no motor-moving parts). Tiny lag-time. It's the smallest camera (most likely in the world) which produces _really_ good images for web publishing (printing is often limited by 5"x7"). It's so thin and lightweight, - I can carry it in my shirt pocket almost without noticing it's there.

The best thing about this camera is that I'm usually need less then 2(!) seconds to take a shot in any situation (take it out of the pocket, click power, aim, shoot - all with a single hand). I don't even bother to stop moving. All you need, in order to achieve the best quality, is to choose a right preset beforehand (like indoor/outdoor and backlight compensation). The second - It gives me about 300 shots (not using flash) out of a full charge.

The only bad thing, I could mention, is proprietary battery. Yes, it's removable, and I'm carrying a couple of charged spares, but to charge them you'll have to carry either a CASIO docking station (though, it's small enough), or an external battery charger. The second - 80cm minimum distance to the subject. So, for the macro shots I have to carry a macro converter lens.

Random nature image:

Check with Polack187. He is the resident photo guru.

M

I ordered a Nikon Coolpix L5. 7.2 MP. Image stabilizer, Integrated memory, 5X optical zoom, AA batts. $195 shipped. Thanks for all your suggestions!

Hmmmmm. I'm going to look into that one. I figure, after reading your posts for several months and recently hearing you're going to research thoroughly before buying, you probably did considerable homework. Thank YOU!

I have a Kodak point-and-shoot and a Nikon dSLR. I won't give advice on brands and models. Previous posts gave great advice on features. I'd guess you can't go too wrong with any of the major brands. Higher resolution is nice, but the file sizes get big too. If you get high enough zoom it is handy, but be ready to bring along a tripod to prevent blurry pics (good idea anyway).

The Kodak gives beautiful color and as mentioned can use AA batteries (I use lithiums), which is a real plus when out and about, though I use the Kodak rechargable batteries with the docking station around home. If I were to do it all over again I wouldn't buy the docking station, but would instead use a separate NiMH charger.

At first I used the Kodak software, but no longer.

I strongly recommend use of Adobe Photoshop Elements software for uploading, organizing, and editing pics. It is FANTASTIC software, especially for the price.

These days I only use a card reader for uploading pics to the PC. When I insert a card, the Adobe software recognizes that is has been inserted and downloads the pictures. I use an option that creates a new folder for each date a pic was taken. Then I use Elements' tagging capability to associate tags with different kinds of pictures (family, vacations, outings, scouts, school, special events, etc...) so it is VERY easy to find those pics later on.

Next, selected pics are uploaded to my Smugmug.com photo site using a "share" feature built right into Elements in cooperation with Smugmug (and a few other photo sites). I started using Smugmug to share pictures with parents of Scouts and school-mates when it became too much of a pain to e-mail them or burn them onto a disk.

Finally, there is the issue of backing up pics. DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR PICS!!! I use Elements' backup feature to do this, and it works pretty well. At first I used CD's. Then I used DVD's. Now I have enough pics that I need to buy a portable hard drive to speed up the process.

If you have another $50-$75 to spend you might look at my 2nd choice: the Canon A710 IS. It has everything the Nikon has plus a traditional viewfinder if that's your thing. Just another suggestion. Good luck!

Thanks for the kind words, but you might want to rethink them. I just found out that the camera I ordered was an import model, meaning that all of the onscreen stuff is in Japanese! Needless to say I canceled the order.

Well, if we're going to import, Japan is one of the countries I have little problem importing from. I think most of their stuff is well-made. That said, I wouldn;t want to have to decipher Japanese to get the camera working!

I just ordered the non-import version for 7$ more. Dodged a bullet there!

The canon sd series is nice and the one I have used for years.

I don't think you will get image stabilization for under $200, but I could be wrong.

If you are just going to take snapshots, don't worry too much about how many megapixels you get. People tend to fixate on that and believe that it guarantees better quality photos, but for 4x6 snapshots, a 3 or 4 megapixel camera will be fine.

I'd suggest perusing cnet.com. They review alot of digital gear including cameras.

Whatever camera you get, remember to factor in the cost of the storage media. Most digitals come with really low capacity SD or complact flash storage media of only 16 MB or so. You will want to upgrade that to at least 512 MB so you can fit all of your pictures on it. (And the more megapixels, the more memory you will chew up. I buy 2GB memory cards - but I take ALOT of pics.)

Also, be sure to set up some backup system or burning your pics to CDs or DVDs or something. If you keep it all on your computer and your computer's hard drive fails - your pictures are gone.

Good luck.