I would be careful of Samsung, Casio, and to some extent Fujifilm. The sensors tend to generate washed out photos. What resolution are you going to be ‘presenting’ the photos at, or printing at (pixel x pixel or inch by inch for print). What the needed quality of the final product will determine what you want to look at.

Many of the point and shoots do not have a flash that will ‘throw’ very far. You can augment that by using a remote flash set for flash trigger (triggers when it sees the camera’s flash go off). Most of the point an shoots will also have poor low light response – even though they may claim low light(images start to get grainy in low light).

Good names to look for are Canon, Sony, Nikon.

I have a Nikon Coolpix S9500. It works pretty well, though focusing in low light can be a problem. It also has a pretty good zoom (550mm equiv) and has a 24mm equiv wide. It does overcompress some images, particularly those with a lot of detail… but I am also known as a pixel peeper(picky and look down to pixels to eval shot). Sony also makes a similar model that I think may actually be better. The Coolpix S9500 is no longer made, and seems to be replaced by a Nikon Coolpix S9700 (from my recollection).

To look for camera evals – you can look at http://www.dpreview.com