A good Digital Camera Needed  

it all depends on how much money you have to spend, what is your price range?

Thomas Kvamme

You also have to consider what you are looking for in a camera. I highly recommend a Koday Easyshare to start off with. They are simple and very good. If you are looking for something w/ a zoom you should look for OPTICAL zoom more than DIGITAL zoom. Optical zoom is how much you can actually zoom in w/ out distorting the quality of an image. Digital zoom is basically what you can zoom in w/ the camera and/or computer. A 3 or 4 meg camera is a good starting camera. You can still print up to 11x13 usualy but how often are you really going to print that.
My 1st digital camera was a Sony Cyberhot, then I got a Kodak Easyshare, then a Digital Canon Rebel XT, and now I have a Fuji Finepix s6000fd which I absolutely love. I have an 11 year old and 6 year old. They both received Kodak Easy shares for Christmas!

FujiFilm are good :) I got one given to me for x-mas and so far it's great. It's a FinePix S5600.

If this is the first camera u are buying I would recomend HP (Hewlett Packard) they are very easy to handle and not very expensive. Nikon is also good, but like you say a bit expensive.
For X/mas I got a Canon from my bf adn I love it.. i just love to take pictures and a digital camera is a must!

I have a Kodak easy share with the printer doc and it really bites. The software won't work right, so I have to go make a cd of the pics at walmart, then bring home and transfer to computer. I would recommend NOT buying one of these! Good Luck

Limited knowledge provides you limited choices and limits confusions as well. If this is the first cam u r buying then go for the best one i.e Canon. They are the brand leaders in this range. And the operation is also user friendly so no need to get pampered.

This may also be out of your price range, but the Canon S2-IS is the best out there right now. You get 12x optical zoom, and even more importantly you get motion control meaning that if your hand is shaking a bit it steadies your picture for you and keeps it from coming out blurry. The S2-IS is easily the best digicam my family have ever owned. It takes really wonderful pictures! ^_^ I would warn you against Olympus cameras. Up until the Canon we only owned Olympus, and while I loved all of the Olympus cameras we owned at first, every single one of them the picture got darker and darker on after about a year, to where we now have to brighten the pictures we take just to see them on our monitor. It's not a setting on the camera or anything else taht we've changed.. it's just the camera wearing out, I guess.

We got an inexpensive (around $40.) Vivitar digital. It is a great little point-and-shoot camera. My daughter loves it and uses it to put her pics on her MySpace.

Canon are top of the line, in my opinion. My husband agrees that they are great. We currently have a small Powershot A620, and it works REALLY well. I do most of my great photography with it, actually. So I'd say something from the Canon Powershot line. And be sure to get something with a fairly decent amount of megapixels. I'd say anything higher than 5 is good. YOu want the pictures to be big in case you want to do anything with them, editting or enlargement wise.

That's a loaded question. There are so many variables. How many megapixels do you want? What price range are you looking at? Are you wanting just a point and shoot, or digital SLR?

Popular Photography (http://www.popphoto.com) is a great site for product reviews of everything photo. In the February issue, they did a comparison of the five latest 10 megapixel digital SLRs. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Samsung. By the end of the article, they found good things and not so good things about each of them. All were under $1000, and they admitted that any of the five would be well worth the money, although Nikon and Canon came out on top.

My suggestion would be to take a look at that magazine, and maybe a few others, and get very educated. After you have read all you can, go somewhere you can put your hands on a few and see how they feel. What might be a great camera may not feel good in your hands, so you won't do so well with it. After you have "played" with a few, you'll be able to make a better decision.