As I had hoped (go go mini-Lazyweb), posting about my camera consideration brought some good feedback from readers. Paul Strasma suggested in a comment that I was undervaluing optical zoom as a feature, and after some thought and research I think I agree with him (unless I want to continue to limit myself to taking pictures of flowers, which are about the only images that work well from one of my two existing solutions). George agrees and suggests that megapixels aren’t everything, provided you’re careful with your composition. One can, after all, take a 1600 by 1200 pixel picture with a 2.0 megapixel camera, which would be more than sufficient for web publishing and most print work that I can imagine myself doing.
Returning to BestBuy.com, it appears that there is a camera that makes that precise trade-off. For the same price as the Olympus that I was considering, which is a 3.0 MP camera with digital zoom, I could pick up the Nikon CoolPix 2200, which has 2.0 megapixels and optical zoom. It’s coincidentally the little brother of the model that Paul was considering and has the same one-hand ergonomic design. Unfortunately my local Best Buy doesn’t have it, so I would have to order it sight unseen…