They've come down so much in price. I refused to bother with the lower megapixels--I use film and good lenses most of the time. But I found a little digital I love that is 5.1 megapixels. You need to buy a memory card for any of them, and for this little CoolPix Nikon 5600, a 256 meg card and battery charger I paid $300. Base price on the camera is right at $250.

The reason I bought this is that the camera has a zoom lens (35mm to 105mm) and is smaller around than a deck of cards, if a little deeper than one. The choice on casual trips is to take the big SLR camera and lenses or not, or to choose which lenses to take or leave behind, and I end up leaving it more than taking it. This little one means some decent photos will be taken because I'm willing to tuck it into my handbag and take along, and I have some control over the shots it produces. It's great for closeup also. It is exactly what I needed.

I have a little 2.1 megapixel camera I bought a year or two ago for next to nothing that I use for emailing back and forth with a friend (we send photos of our yards and work on our houses), but that's just for email. The Nikon photos can be printed like regular photos and look quite sharp (my camera shop is where I'll take them, I'm not planning to start printing with a home printer). I have it on the high jpg setting now, but I can go to the very dense tiff files also.

SRS