  Today after some deliberation and lively arguments with the bigpond lusers on irc, I bought this lovely little urlLink digital camera .
I started looking last night and found that this suited my needs and was in my price range. A few people told me that "Canon were the best". This kind of thing always sets off alarm bells in my head and I am suspicious of people who operate on reputation alone when making purchases.
Further queries to their reasoning were met with answers like "because they make their own lenses", and "the press pit at the car racing all use Canons". For high quality sports photography they may be. I wanted good rich colour over lens quality (its a home user digicam, lens quality is much of a muchness) and I compared the sample photos between the Kodak, Sony, and Canon (in the price range). Kodak won so I went to Dick Smith armed with the knowledge they had run out of a model they had advertised.
(I'm sure there are better places I could have gone, but my price benchmark was digitalcameras.com.au and was up for a challenge). After pointing out to them that they had an advertised model which they were out of stock, and none of the required text stating "limited stock" (this is required by the trade practices act - go work I totally learned something!
) they knocked it down to $475 ($25 off). W00t. I later found out I could have got it down more but the fact that I even *argued* is a huge boost for me. I could have gone further on the illegality of that but I was on a high just from taking that first step (it's a big thing for me ;) Anyway, here is a urlLink photo of my friend the goat, and urlLink another taken by the new cam.
They're a bit overexposed because the light was so bright and brilliant today - but I prefer my photos that way and they demonstrate the insane saturation this camera does. These were taken in auto mode. Perfect for taking random photos of stuff - and setting up a photo blog when I get the chance!! And here's urlLink some sheep because Smegs told me the goat was too contrasty :P (And then he told me that this photo 'didn't work' although it's just me fooling around ;) 
