I got mine from amazon. They were running a deal for $337 for the camera plus a Kingston 2gb sd card (or $12 towards the purchase of an sd card).
It was the cheapest I could find, plus I needed to use a amazon gift card. Local stores were more expensive, plus from amazon I didn't pay tax and shipping was free. I would have considered costco if they carried it, because costco extends the manufacturer's warranty for about 2 years i think, but again they don't carry it. They carry the 850is though.
The 870is is nice, but I wanted to have a viewfinder for the cases that I forgot to charge the battery and needed to conserve battery life. The screen on the 950is was already large enough for me. I was considering the 850is as well because it was almost the same as the 870is expect the screen size is smaller and it has a viewfinder.
i would have been happy with the 850is, but I wanted to use up the gift card, and I figure I wouldn't purchase something like this for another couple of years. The only complaint i have about the camera, is that Canon decided to make the external body very rounded…I guess it looks cooler, but if you try to sit the camera on a bench or table to take a self-timed picture, it doesn't exactly like to sit still 🙂
For memory, for my digital SLR that uses compact flash memory cards, I exclusively SanDisk extreme 3 4gb card for speed (SanDisk extreme 4 is too expensive for me).
But for this point and shoot camera it's already pretty slow, so an expensely fast SD is overkill for me imho. The Kingston should do just fine. Plus I found out I have a few 1GB SD cards lying around from an mp3 player that I can use. At 12.1mp, you probably need at least 4gb of storage to be ok. I generally stay with a name brand, just so there's some quality guarentee. The last thing I want to find out is I've taken a few days of pictures,forgot to upload it during a trip, and my memory card craps out.
If you take a lot of pictures and travel alot, I strongly recommend a portable burner you can take along, because I've had memory that crapped out unexpectedly.
NOTE: i don't own one of these, because I usually just carry around a very pocket laptop 5×7 laptop, and move the pictures to the laptop each day.
As far as the memory prices at geeks.com. You could do better on amazon i think. Plus, I'd get something that comes in the retail packaging. The "sandisk" cards that geeks.com is selling comes only with a 90day warranty, which is a little suspicious because SanDisk typically has a lifetime warranty. You could probably get an Ultra 2 for $26, which is a better card (though I don't plan on it).
