I'm at the point of splurging on a couple of luxuries:

1) A desktop publish package (for XP). It should be professional quality, but will only be used occasionally - which means user friendliness takes priority over batch capabilities and saving keystrokes. (By professional don't neccesarily mean truly professional - but powerful enough so I can make things look the way I want rather than the way package wants without fighting and working around a whole bunch of hard to change defaults.) When I last did DP, that would have meant Pagemaker. Is that still the case?

2) I'm thinking of getting a digital camera just because the last camera of any type in my house stopped working. This is just for snapshots; I am probably the least talented photographer in America. So I want cheap, very user friendly, super-power not neededl , good defaults so I don't have to guess wrong as to how to set thing. The digital camera equivalent of the old cheap kodaks that would develop the picture five minutes later. Basically, I just want to be able to put my kodaks on my hard drive. Not having much that can go wrong, having it hold up would be a plus. Any thoughts here?

Thanks.

When I last did DP, that would have meant Pagemaker. Is that still the case?

I continue to use PageMaker all the time, and still like it. More people use Quark nowadays, though.

For digital cameras, this link was posted uptread a bit. [link]

Hmm - before those reviews will do me much good - where do I find a good on-line intro to the basics of digital cameras? For example do I need more than a megapixel?

OK - Howstuffworks gave a basic intro. However I may need to forget digital for the moment. It looks like most of them run $140+ and above. I was thinking more in the $30 range. I guess digital cameras may be cheap, but not yet THAT cheap.

Typo Boy: When it comes to basics like megapixel resolution, it really depends on what you're going to do with the images. If you want to print them out, then I'd suggest higher than a megapixel. Here's why:

A single megapixel picture is about a 1200x900 image. This can be printed as a 4in x 3in image at 300 dpi, which looks quite nice, but if you try to blow it up any bigger you'll have to drop to a lower resolution, and will get noticable pixellation in the final printed image.

A 4 megapixel camera, on the other hand, is about 2400x1800, which lets you make an 8x6 image at that nice-looking 300 dpi, or 4x3 at an even nicer 600 dpi.

If all you want to do is look at the pictures on your computer and possibly an iPod photo or some such, the 1 megapixel will likely do you, as long as you don't want to blow up small parts of your images to bigger sizes for wallpaper making or some such.

If I were buying one, I think I'd be getting a 3-4 megapixel one myself.

For example do I need more than a megapixel?

Oh yeah. The more mega the better. You also want optical zoom and not just digital zoom. The latter is just like zooming in on a picture on your PC--the bigger/closer it gets the more pixellated it becomes.

The Digital Camera Resource Page is a good place to start.

Hmm - I think I was underestimating the price range of digital cameras. I was thinking the $30 range - I guess for that stick to old fashioned film based cameras; it seems like digital starts at $140. Don't know where I got the impression it could be cheaper.

You can get a digital camera for as little as $US50 but the quality isn't that great.

This was taken on a Concord 2040, which I picked up for AUD69 (an appropriate price, considering the location of the pic :) [link]

Kristen: Dropped you an email. Let me know if you didn't get it, I'll try again.

So ... I have an AVI I can't play on the Mac. Does one download codecs, or a new player? How does one find out what codecs one might need?