RE: DIGITAL CAMERA QUESTION
Computergeeks.com often has great prices on the last product-cycle's cameras. Usually that's the first place I look, and check sites like Steve's Digicams and DPresource for authoritative reviews of the various cameras, then do some more price checking. I don't pay much attention to what users have to say in threads like this, because most people haven't used enough digital cameras to know a good one from a bad one.
Something to keep in mind: you'll have to buy a memory card. The dinky little 16mb and 32mb cards that most cameras come with are just not adequate. You'll want 64mb at a minimum, and would be best off spending a bit more for 128mb. Plenty of people will suggest shooting at a lower MP rating than your camera is capable of, but why? There's absolutely no reason to sacrifice quality like that. You can always scale a photo down, but you can't always make it larger.