I've got the Olympus C-3020 Zoom with 3.2 Megapixel. Love the camera except for trying to shoot anything in motion. I use my 35 Nikon for that. The more megapixels the clearer your pic's will be when you print. Wardey

I also have the Olympus 3020. Very user friendly.
The sony's are great if you have a sony TV the the smart card input. But don't do less than 3.2 megs, these cameras have gotten so inexpensive.

Konica 5 mega
 

I just got the Konica 5 megapixel small one awesome!! only 3x optical zoom but clarity and size is perfect!! has macro also!!

Canon Powershot S30. Very robust construction and lots of manual controls if you want to get fancy. Came highly recommended on the zdnet.com.

My opinion would be get a camera that is 2.0 or higher megapixels, Smartmedia card and one that has the movie feature. It is so neat to make your own AVI's movies and play them on your computer, send them to friends. My introductory camera was a fuji finepix A201, cost me $269. Good little camera for the money.

i have probably one of the cheapest little digital cameras you can buy a HP 120 , you take the pics and plug it in and thats it...presto chango you have pictures , nice ones too

Get one with the media card.
 

Get one with the media card and a cable to link to your computer. They make media card up to 1 gig now.

I have the C-3040Zoom by Olympus. I love it. It was real resonable and I think you can get them now for about 400 bucks or so. It is a 3.3 Mega Pixel camera. All the pictures that you have seen me post on the Tech Q&A area are taken in its lowest resolution setting then shrunk down even more in Photo shop. So as you can see it does take good pictures. When I have it in the lowest setting I can take about 1000 pictures with just one card. :D:D

Jon