May 4th, 2008  
-HAL-
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I've always been a Canon fan myself..

Are you looking for a compact camera or a bigger "pro" one??

Quote:
I would like to ask what features are absolutely essential for eg, is it optical zoom over digital zoom, memory etc.
You can safely pay no attention to how "good" the digital zoom is on different cameras since will make the picture quality worse, no matter what the manufacturer say...
3-4x optical zoom, a good optical stabilizer, 8Mpix (or more) are normally good enough on compact cameras since you'll need a tripod in most cases if you're going to zoom more than that since shaking hands will make the picture blurry..