I can’t seem to leave a comment on my own blog board at the moment, so in reply to Pandora’s question, I use a Canon Ixus V3 which is small yet perfectly formed. I then tweak in Photoshop, but often the levels don't need changing anyway so it’s just a matter of a bit of cropping and resizing.
One small drawback with the V3 is that it's a bit fuzzy on full zoom (2.0x on optical zoom, 6.4x digital) when camera shake becomes quite an issue. For example, we have a strange bird visiting the garden, and I couldn’t hold the camera still enough on full zoom to get a decent pic, even though the bird was only about eight to 10 ft away.
Plus the flash is a bit too harsh for my tastes – it tends to overexpose the foreground in a medium/close range shot (e.g. in a pub or similar) and causes chronic redeye. It’s actually sometimes better to turn the flash right off and compensate in Photoshop, so long as there’s enough ambient light to provide some sort of image. I keep meaning to stick a bit of tracing paper over it to see if that diffuses the light a little, but it seems a shame to go mucking up such a nice camera.
On the whole, though, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Ixus range, and I would take bets that the newer models, like the V4, are far sexier than my V3, which is now a year and a half old. I’ve got a lot of mileage out of it though – it’s small enough that I take it where I wouldn’t bother taking a bigger camera, and it’s good enough quality that it can cope with most circumstances.
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