Camera Suggestions? Recommendations?

verdana

Can anyone help me? I am in the market for a new digital camera.
I will be using it mostly outside, sometimes at night. It gets pretty hot and humid here, so I need something that will hold up to these conditions.

I need more than 5x optical zoom so I can take great pictures of bugs.

These photos may be used in a book I am writing, so quality is important.

I like the image stabilization feature!

RAW format seems to be ideal for what I want, but I'm not sure...
:confused:

Thank you for your time. :)

Torchess-
How much were you planning to spend? If you're serious about bug photography, and you have the money, you should probably be looking at digital SLRs. They cost more. But the image quality and the lens options - especially for macro photography - are much, much better.

If you're commited to a compact camera, Canon, Panasonic, and Konica Minolta are making cameras with image stabilization right now. The best one is probably the 8 megapixel Konica Minolta A2. It's got great resolution, the image stabilization works great, and the lens is equivalent to 28-200mm on a 35mm camera. Here's a link to the Konica Minolta A2 review page:

http://www.pcphotoreview.com/6,Megap...3_5648crx.aspx

For bugs, the zoom ratio isn't that important. What you need is good macro capability. In fact for insects, you'll probably need to buy an attachment lens if you really want to fill the frame. Take a look at the macro/close-up gallery to see what people are using for insect photos. The camera used should be listed on most of the gallery pages:

http://gallery.photographyreview.com...=508&password=

Hope that helps-