[muglo] Looking for a new digicam

Hi, I'm in the market for a new digicam to replace a recently dearly 
departed Canon PowerShot A70 (let this be a lesson to all foolish enough to 
forget to fully seal a ziplock bag in a very humid environment (climbing the 
mountains near Grosmere in the Lakes District of northern England in 8 hours 
of rain)).

The Canon A70 (and all its siblings) are a great camera but I'd like to move 
up to something a little more advanced (most notably with a decent zoom 
capabilty).

I'd like: a good zoom (>3x), 3/4 megapixels, AA batteries, CompactFlash (b/c 
I already have a 256 MB CF), good UI, movie, compression settings (rules out 
the S5000), manual settings (perhaps even manual focus... good for night 
shots or closeups... the A70 was awsome in that respect).

I'm now considering the Fuji S5000 (bad JPEG compression), Minolta DiMAGE 
Z1, Olympus C-740, Kodak EasyShare DX6490 and _maybe_ the Fuji 3800 (an 
underwhelming view-finder + manual feature set... of course, it's only 
£190). The Minolta DiMAGE S414 (4 MP, 4x zoom) also registers on the to be 
considered list even though it lacks a notable-zoom (it makes up for it with 
higher MP).

Does anyone have experience with these or even other cameras that run in the 
£250-300 range with decent zoom capabilities ($500-650 CAD excl. tax) that 
aren't too big?

PS the Canon PowerShot A75 is essentially the A70 but with its UI quirks 
fixed and a few extra settings. They're (the PowerShot A40/70/75/80) an 
extremely versatile point-and-shoot series that actually also have good 
manual over-ride settings (max 15 second exposure... and it works... in full 
darkness I was able to take pictures, and with only a teeny bit of light 
they were quite good (2-3 second exposure)).

Eric.

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