I am in the market for a digital camera that I'm going to surprise my parents with.
First, they most important feature by far is Ease of Use! They do have a PC that they will hook it up to and as well print from but whenever they have gotten a film based camera they looked for one that just had basic features such as built in flash, zoom, but other than that they wanted it to be completely automatic with few manual controls. I am very happy with Sony products but I have heard for Digital Cameras Canon is good but yet as well I've heard Kodak makes very easy to use cameras
Here are the features I'm looking for:
Easy to Use-By Far this is the most important
Built in Flash/Red Eye Reduction
Megapixels-I prefer 3.1 and above
LCD Screen-I would like this to be 2 inches or above
Ability to take 640*480 pictures in JPeg Format
Ability to take MPeg Movie Clips
Optical Zoom of 3x or greater
Has the Pictbridge Option
Easy to Copy Files To/From Computer (With my Sony I simply hook it up
via USB and with file explorerto/from drives)
Ability to add Cards for extra Memory (I assume all do this)
Good Battery Life and Comes with Battery Charger (nice if it would
tell how many minutes are left like the Sonys)
I'm not sure what it's called but the option where you can set the camera to take a picture in 10 secs or so so you can pose and be ready
Image Stabilization would be a nice feature but not necessary
Anyway, I am totally lost but am looking for a camera that fits these specifications. Any ideas of what I should be looking at? I prefer to pay $200-$350 but will go up to $400 if necessary or slightly more.