Advice re digital camera purchase

One more thing to mention about megapixels...

I noticed you said that you'll be doing a lot of close up shots. A 3 megapixels camera will provide a decent quality 8x10 print without cropping. A 4 megapixel camera will provide a decent quality 11x17 print with little to no cropping. Keep in mind that most of the time you will end up cropping an image to remove parts you don't want to show, or simply just to 'blow up' an image to focus more on the subject. Anytime you crop an image and maintain it's aspect ratio, you're going to lose quality. The resolution sets the threshold to the level of quality print you should expect to receive upon cropping an image.

Using the mailbox example as before, say you take a photo of all 100 painted mailboxes but you only want to show a certain portion of it. Lets equate this to a 3 megapixel camera. So you go into your photo editing program, select the section you want to show... say a 3x5 section... and then 'blow it up' to fit on an 8x10 mat size, your quality will be greatly reduced. Now lets say that wall had 200 mailboxes, same size wall... just smaller boxes. If you were to do the exact same thing with this photo as the one mentioned before... your picture would still be fairly clear after you crop/blow it up since you have more mailboxes/area, or in this case, megapixels/area. So really, if you don't plan on blowing anything up or taking closeups, a camera with a lower resolution (megapixels) will suit you just fine. It's when you start to edit the image (crop/blow up) that you'll need to step up the resolution. So more megapixels is only better depending on the application. Make sense?

Also, since you said you'll be taking close-ups... you may want to look into a camera with a Macro function. This gives incredible detail at close range.

As far as the zoom goes... most point n shoot digi cams nowadays are 4x optical and digital usually ranges from 3x and up. The more important of the two, as someone mentioned before, is the optical zoom since the lens actually moves to magnify the image. A digital zoom is in essence cropping the already optically zoomed image, and the further you zoom in with a digital zoom, the more grainy you can expect your pictures to be... especially without a tripod to steady the camera.

As far as the lense goes, you don't really have much of an option with the point n shoot cameras. Sony I believe uses a Carl Zeiss lense in all of their point n shoot cameras which is a good lense. There are other comparable lenses out there, but generally it seems that most companies stick with one brand of lense. Unless you're going to a digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) you're at the mercy of the camera company to choose the lense for you.

Hmm... that's all I can think of as of now. :)