In my opinion, Canon makes the best digital cameras on the market. No one's paying me to say that. I have owned the Canon S200, A400, SD300, and now the SD450. I have also tried cameras by Sony and Kodak, but they were disappointing. Here's how to get started with a Canon camera:

1. Double A or Lithium?  Canon's tiny pocket sized cameras (SD series) use rechargeable lithium batteries. That's fine unless you run out of juice at a bad time. Most of the A series cameras use AA batteries, so you can buy a pack at the zoo in a pinch.
   
2. How many megapixels? Three is plenty unless you want to crop your pictures or make prints bigger than 8x10 from them. I have a 5-megapixel SD450 right now. The SD550 offers 7 megapixels, in a slightly bigger package. The other advantages of the 500 and 550 over the 400 and 450 are better flash performance and longer battery life. I like the smaller size of the 450.
3. Movies! Canon cameras take awesome video clips with sound. The SD300, SD400, SD450, SD500, and SD550 cameras are capable of taking VGA quality movies at 30 frames per second. That's the same quality of DVDs! If you want to take advantage of this feature, you'll have to buy a high-speed card.
   
4. Memory card:  256 MB is plenty if you're just taking pictures. But for videos you'll want at least 1GB, and make sure it's a high-speed SD card you buy (50x or higher.)  I have an A-data 2GB 150x card that works great in my SD450. Videos take up a lot of space -- 2 MB per second at VGA and 30 fps. You can reduce the quality to save memory. At the high quality setting you can fit 8 minutes of video on a 1 GB card. The SD series cameras won't work with cards bigger than 2GB.
5. Buy a card reader! It's easier and faster to transfer your pictures by pulling out your card and putting it into a reader, than by hooking up your camera to the computer. Make sure your reader is USB 2.0!
6. Download Picasa for free -- search for it on Google. It's great for organizing, cropping, and printing pictures. Fixes red-eye too!
7. Put your movies together with Windows Movie Maker if you are running Windows XP. It comes with XP Service Pack 2, and it works great!
8. If you have questions, send me an email. You can find my email address on the FAQ page at my website, FivePercentCard.com.
9. Good luck!