I have a Panasonic 30X video camera with a still shot picture taking option. I get excellent pictures and have yet to use the video portion. Mounted on a tripod, I can get really sharp closeups. A Google search will often turn up a good price on a unit.
Have you ever tried Woot.com or deals.woot.com? They have terrific deals on cameras with zoom. Unfortunately, they have only so many to sell when available and once they're gone, you have to wait until midnight to see what'a available the next day. Cameras come up quite often. In March I bought a Kodak C180 10.2MP 3X Digital Camera for less than $60. They often have Nikon, Canon, and other top brands at similar prices. You just have to check them every day to see what'a available.
Shiopping is always just $5 no matter how many of an item you buy (limit is 3), or the size and weight of that item.

Here is a link that might be useful: Woot: One Day, one deal.

There are two kinds of zoom, one completely worthless and the other worth its weight in gold. The worthless one is what the camera sellers call "digital zoom." Forget about that, you'll never use it. The one you want is called "optical zoom." My camera has 10x optical zoom, and I almost always use it full on in macro close ups.

I also think the Nikon cameras do a better job than most on the reds, a key color in rose photography. I like my Nikon S10 (which is an older model, but I'm sure there's an updated version out there someplace). Before you choose a specific camera, take something red and detailed to a photo counter where they will let you take test shots with a sample model, including extreme close-ups. Then you'll know how that camera does on those two key functions for rose photos.

Kathy

Kathy: that's good advice to take something red to store and take pictures of it.

When I was shopping for a photo printer, I took a bouquet of roses (all colors) and took a photo of it, and then I printed out the photo on various printers ( I had narrowed the choices down already by reading reviews) and compared the results, to the original bouquet (I already had a decent camera).

I just received an e-mail from the Kodak Store. Beginning at 12:01 on the 26th, they'll have a
Kodak Easyshare Z915 Digital Camera with 10 megapixels, 10X optical zoom, and 2.5 in. LCD screen, reg. $199.95,
Sale $99.95.
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If you'll e-mail me or supply your e-mail address I'll forward the e-mail from Kodak.

What I discovered recently, is that the zoom is not the important feature for getting good pictures of your roses. What you want is a camera with a good MACRO setting. I don't know what the specs are that determine the quality of the macro settings, but my old Canon Powershot S500 works so much better now that I learned NOT to zoom, just to get up close and use the macro setting.

Thanks Karl. I sent you an email. I've been using the list from Consumer Reports as my starting point and I didn't see the Kodak listed, but they might not have tested it. I've mostly been using amazon and bfads.net to check prices since most of the cameras will be on sale for black Friday.

I probably should go try some out but I'm working under a bit of time pressure since I'm fairly certain that the best deals will be this weekend. The one that I'm looking at is a Nikon. I'll look up the model number later if anyone is interested.

Landperson -- I usually use the zoom and the macro at the same time. Try it, they should work together well on most cameras.

Kathy

The Nikon that I'm looking at is the L110 which has a 15X zoom. Amazon has it for $199. Consumer Reports gave it a very good rating. The Kodak that Karl found wasn't rated but the other Kodaks didn't do very well in the ratings. I'll ask for the Nikon for xmas and hope that my relatives might get together on it.

Hi Kathy. In fact, what I discovered on my Canon is that they do not work together. I had been trying to do that before, and the results were not very satisfying. Once I read (help, I can't tell you where, but it was recently) that I should be using one or the other, my pictures looked a whole lot better to me. I, however, am a very VERY uneducated camera user, so I maybe am totally wrong about all this....:-))))

I think it's a small over sight but a good after marketing idea for cannon/nikon/kodax that there smaller lens cameras don't have close up filter kits and/or lighting filter kits for them like the higher end 55 MM (D)SLR lenses do.

I seldom "zoom in" for shots of the roses because I have good access to them. I do need to zoom in for roses on climbers. The zoom facility is mainly used for sceneries and group photography, to compose the picture. Unless you buy a DSLR with a fixed lens option almost all, if not all, point and shoots have zoom lenses

I agree that the macro option is a far more important tool for close up photography. For my old Canon G6, I need to switch to macro mode for any objects much closer than 3 feet. There isn't a simple relationship between zoom and macro. At the closest of distance - within 10 cm my G6 macro won't work with any degree of zooming out. As I increase the distance, I can use increasing degrees of zoom. But then it defeats the purpose, as I can get much closer and better images close up and at the shortest focal length, rather than moving away from the object and combining zoom and macro. The only exception is if I need to change the perspectives or if I want to narrow the depth of field + then moving back, zooming in and opening the shutter achieves that effect in combination.

Do you need zoom? Not entirely necessary for rose photography. But if you are paying good money for a piece of equipment, it is unlikely that you will limit it's uise for rose photography. You will soon find yhourself using it for all sorts of other things. For the latter reason, a zoom is a must have. What should the power of the zoom be? The answer is that you get what you pay for.

Another uimportant consideration is the quality of the optics. If you are getting a low cost camera, be aware that any higher levels of zoom may mean a sacrifice in image quality - the worse effect is vignetting..

I use the reviews from www.dprevierw.co. Their reviews are pretty detailed. If you are not interested in the details you can skip to the last one or two pages which gives the pro and cons summary.