Kirk ,
Just a little word of advise about digital cameras . If you do get one , refrain from using the digital zoom and stick with the optical zoom , you can't get in as close but the picture quality falls off drastically .
I was a semi-professional photographer for quite a while so I ran a series of tests using the optical (3x) and digital (10x) zooms and cropped all the pics to the exact same size and content and found that a pic taken with the optical zoom and enlarged and cropped was far superior to the one from the digital zoom even though the enlargement was far greater from the optical zoom . (EG.- digital enlargement - 4x -- optical enlargement - 12X )