I’ve never been terribly impressed with my current digital camera. It’s an Olympus FE-280 that I bought on the spur of the moment in Boston a few years ago when my previous camera decided it didn’t want to stay charged any longer. Feature-wise the Olympus probably has almost everything I want, but its menu system is so convoluted that I can never find how to enable the things I’m after in a reasonable amount of time. In the past few years it has slowly developed some bad pixels (both on the view screen itself and on the CCD cell and now the battery charger is starting to flash ominously suggesting that the battery is about to go to a better place so I think it is about time to start looking for a replacement and this time I want to do some research.

Sadly I know probably just enough about taking photos to make me dangerous which means that I occasionally want to do things that probably warrant use of some expensive feature-packed camera. While I would love the power of something like a digital SLR the reality is I would barely make use of all its features and I need something smaller otherwise I will never carry it around with me. But here is a list of the features I am after, maybe someone has suggestions for cameras that have all of these and more?

• An easy to use mode that does fast exposures
• Good motion stabilization
• A way to take a quick sequence of images with one press of the shutter
• Maybe manual focusing to allow shooting through windows
• Orientation detection, ideally actually orienting the image file but I guess just putting the EXIF orientation marker is a start
• I’d sort of love to get RAW images to play around with in the occasion the camera hasn’t been clever enough to work out what I want

Update: So I guess everyone is recommending either one of the Lumix series or the Canon S90. The latter seems to provide more control over shooting at first glance but then the Panasonic site doesn’t offer the full instruction manual for the Lumix cameras, only basic instructions which makes figuring out exactly what you can do with them and how a little more tricky. The Lumix cameras do claim a faster fps in burst mode and all have more zoom than the S90’s relatively paltry 3.8x. I wonder how much use zoom is though when I’m not going to be using a tripod for shooting.