DinoAdventure said:
Thanks a lot for all the help. That digital camera review site has been very helpful, especially how you can compare the cameras side by side. I'm comparing the D50 and the Rebel to my current camera now, very nice to see all the specs laid out right in front of me.
Your portability point is a good one. Some of my best pictures over the past few years have been with a well traveled Canon digital elph s400 - the pre-SD compact 4 MB compact flash Elph. 9/10 of great photos for me is having a camera with me in the first place. That said, I'm finding that DSLRs are great.
I tried an S80 and found some significant vignetting at the 28 mm setting, so I returned it to B&H. Someone on this forum told me that they had that problem and it was more pronounced that it should have been and they had it into Canon for service. So I don't know if it was a solvable issue. Other than the image problems (which were a show stopper for a camera), I really liked the design of the S80.
My old Elph has died - an E18 error after too many trips to sandy places, and I'll replace it with another pocketable p&s (to be clear, I like having a P&S and something larger, but the P&S historically gets more use because it's with me more often) - most likely the new Elph 700 IS - which has image stablization and a host of settings that were absent from my old Elph, including things like grid lines on demand, white balance control - presets and custom, exposure compensation, evaluative, center and a flavor of spot metering, and 2.1 fps - all in my pocket... fantastic.
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelTechSpecsAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=13019
For the middle of the road between a DSLR and a P&S, perhaps something like the new Canon S3 IS would work for you?
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=13077
I have a friend who's had good results with his S2 IS. The camera is small enough to fit in a loose jacket pocket (it's not tiny like an Elph, but it's not as big or heavy as a DSLR like the smaller D50 or RebelXT/350 either); the large lens retracts into the body; see in hand photo from dpreview of same-size silver S2, attached), but has a great lens (assume it's the same as the lens on the S2 that I thought did a nice job with a 36 to 432mm range) with a 12x zoom and you'd still keep digicam functionality if that's important to you. DPreview doesn't have a review of the new S3 yet (just announced in Feb), but it does have a review (highly recommended) of the S2:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons2is/. The sample images look nice, as one would expect from sample images, I suppose:
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=SampleImagesAct&fcategoryid=144&modelid=13077 $499 from B&H, with their estimated availability stated as May for the S3 (no way to tell if that's an overly conservative projection except to google and see if others are predicting earlier availability).
Good luck.
LG