Just a few points:

1. As a techno-geek, I must say that the new Nikon D80 looks very impressive. Canon and Sony are also making some good D-SLR cameras in the under-$1000 price range. Olympus, Canon, and Sony make my favorite point-and-shoots. If you're going to be using a tripod, make sure that the camera you use has a tripod mount (some of the new ultra-slim cameras don't).

2. On pixels. I'd say that for most uses, 5-7 megapixels is sufficient. 3 MP will give you decent 5x7 prints at 300 dpi. 7 MP will give you okay 8x10 prints at 300 dpi. If you like to crop and edit your photos, you should look for higher resolution than I just quoted. If you're creating a photo archive to record your collection for posterity (including fine details), you need to go much higher.

3. On RAW. It's certainly true that RAW is a format that varies widely across cameras (and is only available for D-SLRs, to my knowledge); because of this variation, various RAW files may not be supported in the future. OTOH, it is currently the only way I know of to save ALL the information captured by the camera. It is also the nearest equivalent to an unprocessed negative. Yes, you have to process it to make it useful, just as you have to process film. You can then save the processed file as a TIFF, JPEG, or whatever meets your needs. I am hopeful that Adobe's DNG format will be widely adopted eventually, which would standardize the RAW format. Right now, only really high-end digital camera (Hasselblad, Leica) use it. 

4. On JPEG. While it's true that JPEG doesn't degrade in the way the physical media do, the way most of us treat JPEGs (by repeatedly saving over the original file) does have the effect of degrading it, if you're using lossy compression as most of us are. Keep a read-only master copy and use it as the basis for your edits and changes, saving these "derivatives" as new files.

5. Good lighting and supports are essential. Lighting is especially critical if you go for a lower-end point-and-shoot, as they don't seem to manage color quite as well as the D-SLRs. If you have the option to change the lens of your camera, upgrading that will be an excellent idea as most of the lens sold with cameras aren't too great.

BTW, there's a very nice technical summary of digital camera pros and cons at http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/library/pdf/vitale/2005-07-vitale-digital-imaging.pdf It is geared more towards archivists and conservators, who probably have need higher resolution and more advanced features than most of us.

Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Coordinator
Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative
Texas State Library and Archives Commission
512.463.5852 (phone) / 512.936.2306 (fax)
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