Kodak EasyShare Z612, Best Buy
Over the weekend I picked up a Kodak EasyShare Z612. It was $379.99 at Best Buy, but I’d check other places first ($56 restocking fee) It’s a 6.1 megapixel camera with a lithium-ion battery, 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, and it can be operated in a “fully” manual mode. That is, you can set the f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, etc — about as manual as a non-SLR digital camera will get. You can direct it to take multiple shots (2 per second) of a scene, and it will store the first or last 8 shots (depending on the mode). This may be a feature all cameras have nowadays, but it also stores all of the shot meta-information in the EXIF fields of the jpeg. (I’m using this information to re-learn, in a practical fashion, how to use f-stops and etc.) It’s a pretty feature rich camera, IMO.