For those at the more basic end of the market, a warning. I got a kind gift of a Umax Astracam 1000, which I'm still enjoying, but I have to work around its eccentricities: after I let it slide to the bottom of a rucksack with a mobile phone, it lost its ability to tell me how many shots were in it correctly, and seems to eat batteries even faster than usual; worse, it doesn't tell you when the batteries are out - you discover it when you bring the camera home and discover that all your prized photos are blue or pink squares.