Meh. That camera's not too bad, but kinda old by now. We didn't manage to sell a lot of them when I was still working for Sony. Instead of telling you to go for a specific model, I'll tell you what to look for. 1. You want a big lens. The lens captures all your information and if its too small, it might not deliver enough data for the CCD to work at full chat. 2. Don't worry about megapixel rating too much. 7.2 is fine, as is 5.1. You don't really want to go much lower than that and I doubt if you can even still find cameras with 4.1mp and 3.2mp ratings, etc. 3. Look at how much storage media costs and how readily available it is. There are few things as annoying as wanting to take tons of pictures but not having enough storage and not being able to find some. 4. Stick to the big brands like Nikon, Canon and Sony. 5. Ignore "digital zoom" and make sure you have some optical zoom on there which you really should have for around R3k. 6. Probably most importantly, USE the camera before you buy it. If the shop doesn't want to allow you, take your business elsewhere. Take some pictures both inside and outside. Get a sales assistant to go outside with you. See how the camera copes on auto settings. Setting everything manually is awesome, but you don't always have time for that so having the camera's "point and click" setting work well is very important. When you have enough pics, a dozen or so, ask to view them on a pc. The camera's screen's absolutely useless for judging picture quality. If you tend to find a bit of blurriness, you're looking at a camera with a crappy lens. That is, of course, if you didn't zoom in tons and/or shook while taking the photo. A tripod might be useful for this. Also, get yourself a mini tripod. They fit easily in your pocket and shouldn't be expensive. It's good for taking those long shots where stability is absolutely necessary. On a 7.2mp camera, you should get over 100 pictures on 1gb of storage, at full quality (get a couple of gig). No, not RAW because RAW's overkill for non-pro camera's anyway. JPEG is fine or BMP if you're really fussy. Remember to get a bag for the camera as they rarely come with one. You could look at lenses, but they tend to be quite costly and a higher end camera would be better suited for that sort of use.
