Oh, heck yeah. The moderatley priced point n’ shoot digital cameras take great photographs. Very high quality.

The tradeoff is size/style versus battery life. I prefer to use Nickle Metal Hydride rechargeable AA batteries — we have a bunch of sets and chargers for them, so they are more convenient and much cheaper than proprietary batteries. Plus, if you forget to bring your spares, you can always buy a set of Duracells in a pinch. These cameras eat batteries and the NiMH batteries are good for hundreds and hundreds of shots. So, with that AA requirement, we’ve had three Canon PowerShots over the years. It’s a little bigger camera, which I like, over the shirt pocket size. Gives you something to grip. The most recent one we bought has a swivel screen. If you remember to set them to the viewer mode so you don’t accidentally turn them on and jam tne lens as it extends into the camera pouch, they are even reliable for a few years at least.

The other thing I like is that Canon lets you choose any combination of pixels and JPG compression level (Fine, SuperFine, etc.), so you have lot so selectivity in quality versus file size tradeoffs. A lot of brands just give you some presets — if you want the least compression (for quality), you have to also go with the biggest pixel choice, which may be more pixels than you need. Magazine quality printing only requires 300 pixels per inch or 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels for a 5 inch by 4 inch professional color magazine photo. That’s only a 2 megapixel photo. You can double that size to 8 x 10 for a decent color print. A 7 megapixel image is enough for pro quality color magazine printing. Most point and shoot users don’t need that much data — it’s just producing monster file sizes for no reason. We have a 7 megapixel camera, but use it at the 3 megapixel setting (2048×1536) most of the time. That produces a 1600 kB file, a 900 kB file, or a 500 kB file with minimum, mid, or max JPEG compression. So we shoot fewer pixels (enough for 7 inch by 5 inch magazine printing and really high quality 8 by 10 color prints, with maximum JPEG quality. We aren’t going to blowing stuff up to poster size, so there’s not much reason to shoot more pixels. As it is, I have to downsize everthing before sending it in emails and stuff, because 2000 pixels across is double the size of most computer monitors, so it won’t come close to fitting on a screen. I take that size down by 50% for sending to relatives and stuff.

If you prefer the ultra small size and stylish colors, etc. Then either the cute little Canons or the Nikon Coolpix would be good options. I think all of those take proprietary rechargeable batteries so you have to use a separate charger and buy extra batteries.