Ah, a good topic to be discussed.
I know that I lurked for a while before I even got close to getting a camera.
Here are a few of my opinions.
The absolute first thing is to REALISTICALLY set your objectives and expectations. For me this meant what mega pixel and more importantly bang for the buck. Secondly was ease of use, and last was all the extra features I would most likely never use.
I have an addition to the megapixel point. Not only does it matter what size you want to print out, but also the added ability to 'crop' an image out of a larger image. Example, most pictures I put on my website for 'viewing pleasure' have a max resulotion of 600 up to 800. And my camera takes an image of 22xx by 17xx. This allows me to keep smaller sections of the larger image without loosing the image quality.
As for bang for the buck. For me and what I was looking for, Nikon had my personal vote. And the Canon was a close second.
I had set my expections early that there was a definite upper limit where the cost is purely unjustifiable for me (totally a personal thing). So getting a SLR was of no use to me. If I wanted that, I have a camera with real film. For the things I would want that amount of detial and depth of true color, film is much better for my cost range. After all, I could buy a 35mm camera and a digital for less then most SLRs. (And I have a 35mm camera already
)
Ease of use comes in here. And really is a personal thing. I actually didn't like the Canon when playing with it. And the Nikon felt great. I will note that my Nikon Coolpix 4500 does NOT make it easy to manually zoom. And when you do, you are physically moving the camera a lot, which defeats most of the purpose!!!
Believe it or not, ALL my pictures were taken in 'macro scene mode', and the camera did all the adjusting. They only thing I really need to do is zoom in and keep the camera steady.
And one other note about digital photography. What programs are you using to edit them? I don't mean you have to change everything around, but too many programs will not be able to save the image to a smaller image size without loosing too much quality. I personally use PhotoShop 6. I crop the image, resize to what I like, then save to a size that is managable on the internet without loosing quality. I could do the same thing with a cheaper program and loose a lot of quality, and thus, waste all time, effort, and MONEY spent on getting such a great camera in the first place!
Ok, there was my 2ยข