Talls Camera in Seattle has a good selection and good customer service - the staff is knowledgeable, they do not try to sell you unnecessary accessories, and they will take care of sending out cameras you buy from them for warranty repairs. My only gripe is that when the store is crowded it can take a very long time to get waited on - they never rush, and each salesperson only handles one person at a time.
For mail order, I have found that the following dealers have excellent prices and are reliable and truthful:
There are many disreputable camera dealers on the web. This has been made worse by a new scam, where some of the price comparison services on the web have deliberately false "user satisfaction ratings" for the crooked dealers! (For example, I found that the user ratings on ShopCartUSA bear no relation to reality - they claim that one of the worst dealers in the world, USA Photonation, has perfect user ratings!) The web site ReSellerRatings collects real user feedback on all kinds of web stores, and is highly recommended.
Digital cameras are evolving so rapidly that whatever is the "best" camera today will be outdated in a few months. One trend is clear, however: digital tape-based camcorders are rapidly being outstripped by the video capabilities of many still cameras. Most causal photographers are already better off buying a pocket camera that can take high-quality mpeg video rather than a dedicated camcorder.
Here are some of the digital cameras I have been happy to own:
Nikon D70 SLR: The real advantage of an SLR is not resolution: many pocket cameras can claim as many pixels. The main advantage is that the much larger sensor in an SLR yields dramatically lower noise with less light. A typical high-quality pocket camera shows noticable noise beyond ASA 50. By contrast, an SLR like the Nikon D70 will take equally good photographs at ASA 400. This allows both better low-light photography, and high-shutter speeds for sports and action shots. The second advantage of an SLR is that it gives the photographer full control of the f-stop and shutter speed: even pocket cameras that offer a manual exposure mode inevitably have a small range of settings from which to choose. The most obvious advantage of an SLR - interchangeable lenses - is actually less important, because non-professionals end up using the same wide-range zoom lens for all their pictures. What do you give up? No video mode.
Sony DSC-P100: This camera and its descendents offer excellent quality pictures (currently the DSC-P200) and great ergonomics. Its rectangular shape makes it much easier to hold than square cameras (like the Casio below).
Casio EX-Z750: Whoever would have thought that Casio makes superb pocket cameras? This tiny, thin camera is a bit awkward to hold, but has unmatched video capabilities: using real-time MPEG-4 compression, it can record 30 minutes of high-quality video (640x480, 30 fps) to a 1 gigabyte SD card, which is more than twice as long as (for example) current Sonys achieve. It is also one of the very few ultra-compact cameras that still includes a real viewfinder in addition to a large video screen for composing shots.
Early albums were created using Photoshop Elements with a custom web gallery style I created that links the original high-resolution images from the reduced-resolution screen images. This allows the web gallery to be used as a permanent archive for your photos. To use this style yourself:
In 2005 I switched from a PC to a Mac . iPhoto 6 has excellent and easy to use tools for basic photo enhancement: cropping, adjusting lighting and colors, and red-eye removal. I use Photoshop Elements on the Mac for more advanced photo editing. For web photo galleries I use the free program Galerie, which is a much more powerful and flexible tool for web galleries than either Photoshop or iPhoto. Its templates are beautiful (why are the ones that come with Photoshop and iPhoto so ugly?), and they all include the ability to include full-resolution images as well as screen-resolution and thumbprint images.
This site including all the photo albums are hosted by globat. Their Terabyte package currently gives 10 Gigabytes of disk space, which gives plenty of room for all my full-resolution photos and videos. It currently costs about $100 @ year, but they frequently have sales: I paid $40 for the first year.
I use Dreamweaver to edit my site, link in the photo galleries, and upload everything to globat. Dreamweaver is much better designed and more robust than Microsoft Frontpage, and much more flexible than Apple iWeb. Although Dreamweaver lists for $400, students and faculty at any school or university can get it much more cheaply. For example, the University of Washington computer store sells it for less than $100, and anyone at any school can order it through the Adobe Education Store for $200.
The video files produced by any point and shoot are only mildly compressed, so it is a good idea to further compress them before posting on a web site. The best format is MPEG-4, which can be produced by Apple's QuickTime Pro and by the inexpensive encoders for Windows or Macs from Divx.com. For maximum compatibility with all computer systems, save the files in MP4 format. If you save the files as Quicktime MOV files (specifying an MPEG-4 encoder), the files will give trouble to PC users who have not downloaded Quicktime Player. Similarly, Windows Media format (WMV) gives comparable results to MPEG-4 but is problematic for Mac and Linux users.
When I was using a PC for video editing I used Pinnacle Studio, but finally gave up, because it crashes so frequently. If you are thinking of using it, you should believe the many negative users reviews you can find on the web. For PC users, I do highly recommend the inexpensive video utility program AVS Video Converter. This program converts between just about all video and audio formats, can join files and perform simple editing, and burns all kinds of media, including video DVDs and all the varieties of video CDs. It is particularly noteworthy that it can convert in both directions between Windows Media and Apple Quicktime formats.
In the summer of 2005 I switched video production to an iMac G5. iMovie and iDVD have proven to be more than adequate for my needs and absolutely crash-free. The free utility MPEG Streamclip is a must-have, because it does a great job in converting "muxed" MPEG clips captured by my Sony camera to DVD streams that iMovie can handle. I use a Canopus ADVC-55 to input analog video from my old Hi-8 video recorder to digital video with excellent results.
Once you create a DVD, you should print a nice label for it. The best program for the Mac I have found is the inexpensive shareware program Discus.
If you are in the market for a digital camera, the best, more detailed and useful reviews appear at http://dpreview.com. Another good site that that is just a step down in detail but covers more equipment (essentially everything on the market) is http://steves-digicams.com .