hey wonderbird! well, you're going to need to narrow down your price range because what you can get under $200 is VASTLY different from what you can get under $300. As stated in the other thread, canon makes great digital cameras (although they're obviously not the only one.) When I started shopping around for a digi I decided that I mostly wanted to concentrate on camera company brands, as opposed to Hewlett-Packard, etc. Which is why I ended up with a Canon, and apparently a lot of other tpunk's have them too.
The more megapixels a camera has, the larger the picture/ file size will be. Not all cameras with the same amount of megapixels are created equal, though, so do some research on individual cameras before you commit. You can check out
digital camera resource and
Steve's Digicams for great in-depth reviews of tons of cameras. These reviews are very technologically oriented, though, so a lot of what they're talking about will probably make your eyes cross, but in the end you can get the gist of what they're saying.
Also check out
epinions or
amazon.com, they have a lot of consumer reviews which can help after you've been reading the tech reviews.
Also look for a camera that has a decent *optical* zoom, as opposed to a high digital zoom. Ideally nothing under 3x and that's even a bit low, depending on your price range.
Hope this helps!! Let us know what you end up with!