It was a mixture of both, and the reviews. I have an older Canon S30 that I purchased with the reviews of Euro and NA. I really wanted the Canon S80 but I couldn't spend that kind of money right now (It's $500).

This camera is very thin, will fit in my pocket or a small purse. It doesn't require a dock to download from or charge the battery with (another brand does). I was debating between the Canon and the Pentax Optio S6. In the end the Canon got slightly better reviews.

Yes. And he hears no evil.

it is a photo taken of a peice of a postcard I have

I have the same camera, 'cept mine's only got 5 megapixels. I like it a lot.

I love my new camera. Does anyone know where I can buy flashbulbs?

:D

I'm going the wrong way (or, what I like to call the right way) with cameras. Everybody else's keep getting smaller and mine keeps getting bigger. But now that I've reacclimated myself to an SLR I don't know that I can ever go back again.

Someone's going to have to define for me what people mean by "SLR" in the digital age. Because by the definition I know, my camera, which apparantly is not considered an "SLR" has the distinguishing charactersitic of traditional SLR.

The definition I know for "SLR" (Single-Lens Reflex) is that an SLR camera is one in which the image you see through the viewfinder is the same image you that the lens sees. As opposed to a stnadard camera where the viewfinder is separate from the lens, but slightly offset. The advantage to an SLR being that you see exactly what is in the frame of the lens, rather than being off by a hair.

Traditionally, this has been achieved using prisms to split the image. But with the advent of digital, that's no longer necessary. The image that's shown on the LCD view screen of a digital camera is taken directly from the lens, (as evidenced on my camera when the automatic lens cover gets stuck half-open, leaving weird black shadows at the edge of my view screen).

So it that's no longer the distinguishing characterstic of an "SLR" camera, what the heck does it mean?

Aside from the S80 I was quasi-seriously considering this one.

Essentially it still means the same thing but functionally the key difference in a Digital SLR is that the lens body is mounted and removable where non-SLR cameras all use fixed-body lenses.

There is still a technological value to a mirror SLR over simply using LCDs to compose the image. That benefit is in focusing. No camera-back LCD currently on market (and definitely no view-finder LCD) offers sufficient resolution for accurate focusing.

Finally, the digital SLRs on market now all offer a significant improvement of image quality at the same resolution since they CCDs inside the cameras are larger than the ones inside small digital cameras. Also, the optics of even the standard lenses tend to be better than the micro-lenses found on most standard digital cameras.

So in the digital age "SLR" is essentially a catch-all term for a bundle of features common to SLRs that aren't necessarily dependent on the actual SLR mechanism. There are a few manufacturers of prosumer digital cameras that have interchangeable lenses but do not actually use an SLR mirror.