I’m one of those overly analytical consumers who research every model, style and feature before I buy. This is my new baby, the Sony DSC-H9 You can get it onsale for just about $370 and it’s worth the upper limit for it’s 15x optical zoom, lots of auto settings for sports, portraits etc Plus if you want to do the hobby thing, settings can go completely manual.

Pop a memory card in the bottom and you can also take MPEGS if you like to capture mini-movies.

Bang for the buck was my goal and this is the one that won.