Buying digital camera.....need input

[LxMustangRacer]

Don't go under 2 megapixels, I'd look to see if there were any affordable 3 megapixel cameras out there. The camera will come with batteries and a small memory card, allowing you to maybe take 10 pictures at the higher resolutions. The higher the optical zoom the better, like srv1 said, digital zoom is crap. Using digital zoom will lower the quality of the picture, and it can be easily done after the picture is taken with a computer. I have an Olympus D-490 with a 64mb card, and I too use rayovac rechargables. Seems to be a popular choice.