Let’s assume that you will buy a new cam­era. If you are going to cre­ate seri­ous art, sell your ser­vices for wed­dings and por­traits or even make it a seri­ous hob­by, an SLR (prob­a­bly a dig­i­tal) will best suit your needs. They allow you the most cre­ative options with large image sen­sors, inter­changi­ble lens­es, fil­ters and attach­ments.

On the oth­er hand, if you are look­ing to doc­u­ment your life, want ease of use and the best qual­i­ty a point and shoot cam­era can deliv­er, con­sid­er the Canon G12, the Nikon P7000 or the Pana­son­ic Lumix DMC-LX5.

These top of the line point and shoot cam­eras are what many pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers car­ry when they are not work­ing. They take excel­lent pic­tures and allow full man­u­al con­trol. The specs are slight­ly dif­fer­ent for each cam­era, but they have Image Sta­bi­liza­tion, 5x to 7x zoom, HD video, hot shoes and are as good as a point and shoot gets in low light. Lens­es are not inter­changi­ble, elim­i­nat­ing that con­cern mak­ing them much eas­i­er to car­ry.

I do not own any of these cam­eras but one is on my wish list. The links take you to Ama­zon where you can read many user reviews and asso­ci­at­ed com­ments your­self.

You will see many cheap­er point and shoot cam­eras.  When you eval­u­ate their fea­tures and qual­i­ty, these are the cam­eras that they should be com­pared to.