A couple years ago, as I was starting to get back into photography, I bought two cameras: an Olympus Camedia C3030 and a Canon ELPH 2. And I’m not completely happy with either of them.
The Olympus is a 3 megapixel digital camera, and featurewise it’s pretty nice — there’s better available now (including the successor Olympus Camedia C4000, but based on my criteria at the time it was a good choice. It’s just that my criteria were wrong. In particular, I didn’t put enough consideration into how important a digital camera’s UI is, and just how awful they can be. I’ve never actually used many of the advanced features on the Olympus because I need to look up in the manual how to use them, and who carries a camera manual around with them? Second, I didn’t put much thought into size — the Olympus isn’t a terribly large camera, but it’s too large for a pocket, so I only have it with me when I’m sure there’ll be something I want to take pictures of.
After getting a little experience with the Camedia, I got a second camera to address those problems — the ELPH 2. It’s a sweet little camera, it’s easy to get it do whatever you want (within the limitations of what it can do — which are usually enough for me). But, it’s not digital, it’s APS frame size to keep the size down and some encoding on the film to support some advanced features like aspect ratio selection, automatic film speed detection, and mid-roll film changing).
I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d have been better off just getting one of the Canon ELPH Digital cameras. The imminent introduction of the Canon Powershot S400 is tempting me to splurge on a new one. 4 megapixel with 3× optical zoom (plus 3.6× digital zoom), all in a nice shirt-pocket formfactor. Maybe someone will get me one…