Digital cameras forum: What's a good point & shoot alternative to a dSLR ?

You may want to look at the Canon S2IS. I've had one for 6 months and I love it plus, with the S3IS now out the prices are down substantially. You cant't put it in your pocket but you can't do that with a Dslr either.

Good luck with the new baby.

JG

I'm a big fan of the big-zoom Panasonics. The new FZ7 is especially fast (shutter lag comparable to an SLR). The lenses are superb, lots of zoom, easy to use on auto, you can learn all the features one by one and slowly progress from all-auto to all-manual (at which point you'll be ready to use an SLR), and extremely compact for all the features it has (although I say that because I also have a 20D...). The FZ7 is smaller than the FZ30. The FZ10, FZ20 and FZ30 are almost the size of a Rebel XT, but the FZ1, FZ3, FZ5, and FZ7 are quite a bit smaller, with nearly all the features except the flash shoe and focus ring. I think the FZ7 manual-focuses using buttons, though, which is about the same thing as a focus-by-wire ring...

... I first thought an SLR was kinda intimidating (and a little out of my price range).

And what's even better: On my Lumix, as you change the aperture and shutter speed and ISO up and down, the image on the LCD/EVF gets correspondingly darker or brighter. This allowed me to build an intuition for exposure settings more quickly than an SLR could have. It's nice to have an electronic image that changes in real time whenever you change a setting - to me, that was the best way to learn about all the settings. In an SLR, you only see the result of changes AFTER you take each shot (which is still a vast improvement over having to wait for film to be developed, but still).

Sure, within only a couple months of regularly using the Lumix, I was ready for an SLR. But I really really liked having that Lumix to learn about all the settings. And SLRs are so big, especially when you want a 400mm lens like I do, so the convenience of the Lumix was hard to beat.