Look at Casio Exilim cameras. La_chica_gomela got one about a year ago and we both love it. Hers is pink, which she likes, but it is also full of features. It’s a point and shoot camera, so you don’t need to know about f-stops or lighting, but it has a lot of different settings so you can take shots of flowers close up, or night time portraits, or sports shots. They’re basically all labeled as modes. But it also has a Best Shot mode that will try to figure out the best mode to use. It’s usually correct, but sometimes you can get a better picture by using a specific mode.
It allows you good control over the flash also, including None, Red-Eye Reduction, Soft (we use this a lot), On, and Auto.
She has a 4GB SD card (which she bought extra) and it holds hundreds of very high quality pictures. It took us about a year to get close to filling it up at all, and we take a lot of pictures.
It lets you review your pictures with a nice color LCD screen. And it has a nice feature that if you hold down the left or right buttons while in Play (review pictures) mode, it will speed through all the pictures on the card. Not only is this better than pushing the button 300 times, but it’s actually quite pleasing to see “your life flash before your eyes”. We took some pictures of ourselves in slightly varying poses to make a kind of stop motion animation when we scan through the pictures. It’s fun!
It also takes video, but it’s only good for catching a moment at a party or something. I tried to use it to take video of snow so I could model snowflakes for some programming I was doing, but the snow flakes were blurred from frame to frame.
It interfaces with a computer WITHOUT installing a bunch of stupid software, which I like. Basically, your computer just sees it as an external hard drive. Since I hate worthless software cluttering my computer, this works great. No idea if it works with Macs though. If your computer has an SD card reader built in (my laptop does), you can read it directly instead of connecting the camera via USB.
The battery life is very good. We sometimes forget to charge it, but that’s our fault. It will hold a charge for weeks and weeks if it isn’t used often, and for days if you use it a lot. It charges in about 8 hours.
Finally, we don’t have this one, but they have recently made one which does shoot high quality video, including high speed video (up to 1000 frames per second!). I have it on my wish list and hope I can get it soon.
http://www.amazon.com/Casio-High-Speed-EX-FC100-Stabilized-Black/dp/B001OTZR22/ref=wl_it_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I249GSUA27XREP&colid=3NMII9XAF6A1N
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