Irma, Since you do not have a home computer, you might want to look into a camera that prints directly to it's own little cradle / printer. Consumer Reports has an article this month on the best ones for various purposes. If you don't have access to Consumer Reports and want to see the article I could either fax or email it to you. But generally, for your purpose, just wanting the best basic camera with printing option without a computer...I think the Kodak one was highly rated. I suggest going to Best Buy, they usually have the best prices and will price match legitimate ads, and you can easily exchange in case of defect.

Hi Tom and welcome to the Photography forum. I have no personal experience with your camera so I opted to call up a copy of the owners manual to check some of the specifications, and I must say, for a point & shoot camera I was very impressed. I will try to take your questions in order and I am sure others will follow with even more information. Q: "Is it better to shoot the original at 10-14 mp and then reduce the pics, or shoot at 1 or 2 mp?" A:..Digital cameras record pictures by breaking them down into microfine dots of colored light, then recording the position of those dots. The term MP (mega pixels) is defining how many million dots per inch that is actually being recorded. In photography we refer to the quality of the detail as the "Resolution" of the picture. In a nutshell, the more MP that are recorded by your camera, the finer the detail it records. The question then becomes, how many MP do I need? The answer here depends upon what you intend to do with the pictures. If all you really desire are 4x5 or 4x6 full frame photos for the family album, then in most cases anything in the order of 4 to 6mp will suite your needs but, if you intend to go into post processing (editing and correcting on the computer) you will no doubt want to occassionally "crop" a photo, which means you cut a smaller section out of the photo and blow that up to full frame or you may occassionally have a photo that you want to blow up to 8 x 10, 11 x 14 or even poster size at 24 x 36. In order for your computer to expand the image it has to widen the dots and when we begin to seriously enlarge an image we begin to see a loss in image quality and often microfine white dots, which are defined in the electronics industry as "noise". Technically speaking the noise is generated when the dots are expanded too far and the camera or computer is left with open spaces between the dots, which it fills in with a white dot, but you need not know all that. Just suffice it to say that the larger the output you desire the more MP of information you need to give the computer to work with. Although nearly all cameras today are shooting in the 10 to 15MP range, even 6MP is sufficient to produce very good results for full frame images enlarged up to 8x10. Having said all of that, it also depends upon the physical size of the digital sensor that is in the camera. Obviously even if they are both rated at 12MP a 1/4" wide sensor in a cell phone cannot record as much data as a 2-1/2" sensor in a professional DSLR. Q:..Is it better to shoot the original at 10-14 mp and then reduce the pics, or shoot at 1 or 2 mp? A. I would always shoot the photo at the maximum resolution. In this manner you will have an archive photo that can be reduced for email or printed to a larger size. When I want to post a photo in a forum I pull the photo up in my editing program, reduce it, then hit "save as" and give it another file name or an extension on the file name, by example, when I reduce a photo for email I give add the word email to the file name and save that as a separate file. Q: Somebody told me there are different kinds of SD cards A. Basically there are two types of cards, SD cards and SDHC cards, which are high capacity cards. Tyically HD cards range from about 128kb to 2GB while the HD cards go up to 32GB and possibly more. I checked the specifications on your camera and the internal software will support using both SD & SDHC cards up to 32GB although I personally don't use any cards larger than 4GB. You can buy 2GB or 4GB cards on Ebay for about $5 to $7 with free S&H, whereas a 32GB card is in the order of $80. I just find it cheaper and more convenient to carry a couple spare 4GB cards, although in all honesty generally even one 4GB card is sufficient for most of my outings. By example, when shooting my Pentax K10d (10.2MP) if I shoot in RAW mode, which produces the highest resolution I can get up to 175 photos on one 4GB card or if I opt to set the camera on the highest resolution in JPEG mode I can get 804 frames on the same card. If I were to select the lowest resolution in JPEG mode I could get 2366 frames on one card. As you can see, if you were to get even one 4Gb SDHC card you could probably take your camera on a weeks vacation and never worry about running out of film, so to speak. If you do shoot a lot of photos I would stronly encourage you to get a couple extra rechargeabe batteries. They take up precious little space in the camera bag, but there is no worse feeling that being somewhere and just as your ready to shoot, the battery is dead. My camera will shoot over 700 frames on one battery, but I still never go in the field without two spares. Q...What's a good picture size to use for posting on forums like gardenweb? I use "Photoscape" to resize my photos for the web. The program is a free download from Google and in the editor mode it has a button marked "Resize". When you hit that button a window opens and you choose the width size you want. For the Web I generally hit the 900, which produces a photo at 900 x 598MP. (careful here, when you resize the photo be sure to use the "Save AS" and add an extension or give a new file name. This way it will not effect your archive photo. i sincerely hope this have offered you some help and I am sure others will soon add more info.

Circuit City currently has a nice Samsung 7.2mp camera on sale for $75 with a free printer. Most people do not need all the bells and whistles, as others have pointed out, but the Samsung has a nice collection of features. You actually don't need super-high megapixels if you're not going to make big enlargements, do heavy cropping (like taking only 10% of a picture and blowing it up), or take really, really tight closeups, and very high resolution does chew up the camera's memory and hard-drive space... higher megapixels does not necessarily equate to a better camera. I have a Kodak Easyshare camera and like it very much - it has stood up to quite a bit of abuse like getting dropped, left in the freezing or roasting car, etc. Five years old and operates just as well as the day it was purchased. (It skews a tad to the pink on occasion but if I weren't so dang lazy I could correct that easily, and it has been fixed in later models.) It is a 3.1MP camera and still takes perfectly presentable pictures for my needs - photo sharing here, family/pets snapshots, that sort of thing. Circuit City has the current 7MP model for $100 with a free printer; Best Buy has it for $100 with no printer. Some people really like having the photo printer, we never even used up the supplied package of paper that came with ours and ended up giving it away. If I need hardcopy prints I go to somewhere like CVS or Walgreens for them, since they frequently have coupons for free prints, and get good 4x6 and even 5x7s out of my sorry ole 3.1 even with moderate cropping. ;-) A pawnshop is another place to get a cheap, used digital camera, and you'll be able to get your hands on it before you purchase to make sure it works.

Maggie Sue, thanks so much for the encouragement. I feel a lot better after looking at the pictures in the photo shop. I didn't take anymore today but must get click happy tomorrow. I finished sewing my Bento Box quilt top. Sharon F. posted a picture of a block and I went from there. I really like it so will flick a pic tomorrow. I don't have a computer or printer... it will be getting the pictures from the camera over to Photobucket. Then I will be okay. I have to do this on my DD's computer at her house. I didn't get a user's manual but I found some info at Kodak web that is usefull so I need DD to print some of it out for me to use as reference. I had to call my Sasktel support people because of some E-mail problems. The nice fellow I talked to asked me if there was anything else he could help me with today. I said I have this new digital camera...do you know anything about them. He chuckled...no, not today. I thought it was worth trying!