Digital Cam < $400 ??

Any recommendations on the most bang for my buck for under $400?

Under $400 is hard to come by from a legit company in terms of SLRs. You're looking at point and shoots, which are great and defenitly have a place. What will you be using the camera for? (I work at a camera shop) Both Olympus and Pentax have water proof under water cams, the Olympus (770SW) is also showck proof, freeze proof and you can take into water as deep as 33feet. The pentax has a slight edge on image quality, but outside of being water proof you still have to be careful with it. That's the plus side to the Olypus, all its guts are gel mounted, I have one for when I'm not luggin arround my SLR and I have beat'n the crud out of the thing and it takes it in stride. Been partying with it and dropped it on concrete a few times, took it wakeboarding and fell on it a few times. This thing is rugged. I believe they retail for arround $370. The Pentax is about $300. But if durability isn't you're number one priority, and image quality is, I would recomend one of the fuji's. The image quality comming out of those surpasses all the competion hands down in your "in you pocket" size camera. Don't know the retail value off the top of my head, I thnk the model I am thinking of is the f40. I'll have to double check at work tomorrow. Anywho, let us know what you're looking for in a camera and it will be a lot easier to assist you.

The real question is "what do you want to do with it?"

Bess, is highly knowledge and I had not heard that Fuji was superior, but don't really follow point and shoot cameras. These days you can get a point and shoot that WILL shoot in RAW format. Highly reommended as you can easily edit the photos in photoshop. Of course that is one more major expense if you do not already have an editing program. One other thing you will probably want is a high magnification lens. Something around 10X. This will help if shooting wakeboarding and other subjects at a distance. The size of the lens does matter as it lets more light in, so a decent camera is not going to be a tiny pocket camera.

My recommendation is to keep that $400 in your pocket and save another $300 and then buy the Canon Rebel XTi with kit 18-55 lens for $719 from buydig.com. The shutter delay on these point and shoots absolutely kill me, I always seem to miss the perfect shot by 0.5 seconds. The problem with the XTi (and any other dSLR) is that suddenly you see all the awesome lenses available, and they often cost more than the camera... I don't know a single person who went dSLR and said "That sure wasn't worth the money."

Thanks everyone! I'll be using it for just that... point and shoot. I have $350 in gift cards to BestBuy and just in time for my old camera to take a watery resting place. I'll see if they have any of the above, especially the Olympus since durability is key. (I'm not the easiest on cell phones, cameras, etc.)
The XTi sounds great if I can get it at a decent price.