I use an Olympus Camedia C-2100 Ultra Zoom, the only camera in the world with a name longer than its battery life!

I bought it a number of years ago on Tony Mandile's recommendation.  He showed some pics on the Firearms Forum that his granddaughter took with one and I figured "if a little girl can shoot photos that nice, I should be able to, too!"   It has only 2.1 megapixels, minuscule by today's standards, but takes very acceptable photos so long as I don't plan on blowing them up to wall-sized murals (and I don't).

The feature that I most like about it is the 10X optical zoom with image stabilization.  That has allowed me to shoot perfectly sharp deer photos at twilight (except the deer's twitching tail is a blur) and reach out very nicely to shoot small or distant targets.  This is the camera that took those Oriole and Grosbeak photos I showed recently in the Birding topic, Joe.

The downside?  Two things: one is a strange intermittent problem that shuts the camera down occasionally despite anything I do to restart it.  No, it isn't a matter of discharged batteries.  This has never troubled me when taking outdoor pictures, but the camera seems to be people-shy and I have had this problem when taking pictures at family parties.

The other is simply its size.  While similar to a 35mm SLR, there are so many good digital pocket cameras out today that the Olympus usually gets left at home while I use my wife's Canon Elf.  the Elf isn't as good for outdoors work, having a limited zoom capability, but I don't take that many outdoor photos anymore.

Stu