[SGVLUG] Cameras, part II

[Emerson, Tom]

The earlier discussion about digital cameras got me to actually go look at fry's & best buy.  It seems there is a big gap right at the price-point I'm willing to pay for an "everyday" camera...

  For $20 to $30, it seems you can get "pen/keychain" cameras of dubious quality or usability:
    -- they only retain photos in memory so long as the battery is good
    -- they will drain the battery, even when "off", in about three days [because you're really powering memory all that time]
    -- resolution is vga/qvga [640x480 or 320x240] or /worse/ -- if the packaging doesn't say it, you're probably getting some really obscure resolution and "1/4" of that resolution (1/2 the pixels in both directions)
    -- photo quality itself is pretty poor /under linux/ [it may be "acceptable" (for a website) when accessed from windows, but we don't wanna go there...)
    -- the ONLY memory available is built-in -- cannot use CF/memstick/xd/whatever for additional storage; thus capacity is 20-50 photos before it has to be dumped to a PC

the only "plus" (other than price) is that they have "low latency" between pushing the button and actually having an image captured -- overall, makes it convenient to carry at all times and take random shots.

The next "price point" for digital cameras seems to be $200 or more -- (though I think I saw -ONE- camera for $99)  since this was a bit higher than what I was looking for, I didn't really stop to note "features", but generally what I recall is this:

   -- they all have some form of LCD screen in addition to any through-the-body/through-the-lens viewfinder
   -- they all seem to have plenty of "modes" [AE type stuff...] which is more distracting when all you want or need is "point-n-shoot" capability
   -- many/most don't seem to have (internal) memory -- everything is dumped to an external chip/memory card [not really a bad thing, I suppose...]  Since cards like those are easy to "swipe" from a display model, retailers won't have any installed, so it becomes difficult to determine latency and load/ready times since the camera will not actually take any pictures.
   -- at $200 or more, this isn't something I'm going to carry around "in my pocket" every day, so I'll still miss out on those random times throughout the day when I see something worth taking a picture.

It seems to me that in that "gap" between $20 and $200 would be what I want:

   -- retain pics w/out power [don't drain batteries when "off"]
   -- resolution to 1280x1024 [though 1024x768 would probably work as well]
   -- decent to "quite nice" photo quality /even under linux/
      -- which implies good digikam/gtkphoto/etc. support
   -- slot for additional memory would be nice [though if base memory is sufficient, this isn't a huge need]
   -- no need for excessive "features" [AE modes, in-camera editing, "effects" like solarize or tintype (though these tend to be on video cameras more often...), etc.]
   -- no real need for an LCD screen [yes, it's nice to preview-and-delete bad pics, but again, if the capacity is sufficient (100+ pics) in all likelihood I'll be able to dump the photos to a PC or simply use "another card" until the photos can be captured and evaluated.]

Does anyone know of a camera that would fit this bill (and price range of $50 to $80) [and not used/on e-bay]