After a lot of research and collecting advice, I finally purchased an ultra-compact digital camera!

Top ones in the running included the popular Canon SD500 and the Nikon 5900/7900.  But the eventual winner was - The Casio Exlim EX-Z750!  All of the candidates seemed to be of similar size, functionality and have similar fan bases.  Side-by-side comparisons such as this one were not generally overwhelmingly conclusive (depending on a lot of personal preference).  But the Casio has a couple of features that I fell in love with:

1. A huge 2.5" LCD screen which covers the majority of the back of the camera.  This is turning out to be even more useful than I ever thought!  Not only does the larger screen make framing the shot easier, but it’s large enough to view the result (for instance, showing the image to friends) in a very useable way.
2. The user interface is very intuitive, and includes a large collection of scene modes which promise to make those average photos (not worth taking the time to optimize the settings) much better.  For instance, the white-board scene sets the exposure parameters quickly, and then provides the option to crop the result and remove the parallax - which is very useful but would generally be too time consuming to warrant the investment.

My ideal camera would have two missing features of the Casio though:

1. No time lapse mode (why not? it’s just software).
2. An option for both downloading to a PC and recharging the battery directly through USB (the cradle is very useful for the home base station, but a bit bulky to be convenient on the road).

The Climbing Roses picture is direct from the camera, using the "Flower" scene mode with no adjustments.  I think it looks a bit better with a slight contrast adjustment (hit "Auto Contrast" in Picasa2).

[Update: 6/29/05 noticed that the above statement is not quite right - MSN Spaces resizes photos to 640 wide on upload, so I can't really claim it's right out of the camera...]