Looking for a new digital camera

[keenercam]

We love our digital camera and it takes great pics -- it is a Canon Power Shot S45. You can see it here: Canon Powershot S45
However, we are looking for something considerably smaller. The most important features are: a great zoom lens; auto flash, etc. because I am not very savvy about that stuff; and size/weight. We really LOVE the steel case of the S45 since it has been dropped a couple of times and survived.

Any suggestions from the experts?

 

[Groucho]

You won't get much zoom with a smaller camera. You're probably going to be stuck with 3x. MAYBE 4x or 5x in one or two of them. The vast majority will be 3x, though. (Ignore "digital zoom" as that's useless.)

Every digital camera has auto flash, so that's not an issue.

We recently picked up a Canon SD600 "Elph" for the wife - it's very small and seems to do a good job. I couldn't find anything in its price range that seemed better (and believe me, I tried - I'm not a huge Canon fan, sorry, Canon lovers). I can be had for $219 from Beach, we picked it up a couple bucks cheaper by buying online during the Black Friday sales from Circuit City and picking it up when the crowds thinned out. The SD630 is basically the same but with a bigger LCD (3" vs 2.5") and the price goes up from there. It's 6mp which is really plenty, probably too much (it does get noisy as the light goes down, like all high-mp PnS cameras.) Overall though, it's pretty nice - fast, the photos look pretty good, and the movie mode works well.

 

[keenercam]

Thanks, Groucho. Sounds great! We actually had the Elph version of the APS camera before our digital and the quality of pix was excellent. I will look at your suggestion.

Does anyone have any suggestions for others I should consider?