I've had several in my tenure;

1) I don't know what on earth it was. I think it was a nikon. I got it for christmas in 2001. It's pretty crappy. I found it recently and marvelled how I could ever stand to take pictures with it for 4 years.

2) It's actually my mother's but I used it far more and beyond what she ever did. It's a minolta d-image Z and pretty amazing for a beginner to manual camera settings. i used it until I went to college and mom wouldn't let me take it with me. For some reason my old digital one wasn't good enough for her, although she did try to sneak it in when she visited my sister in prison because it was smaller.

3) I bought a d-SRL when I started college mainly because I had always wanted one. A pretty frivolous purchase, but I probably won't need another one ever (just new lenses!). I recently discovered how to use the manual focus (I am ashamed about this enough as it is, trust me) so I'm even more pleased with it, although the automatic focus is amazing in itself. Oh yeah it's a Nikon D-40.

4) The d-SRL is huge, so I got a small digital camera that I could feasibly take around places. It's not hugely small, but it's smaller than the d-image. It's a samsung S730 I think (I'd have to check, it' sone of their S ones). It was a birthday present actually And it's one I'd recommend to you shlup-kun.

It ran me about $120, but I saw they had them at radioshack for about $80 atm. It's small, you can manually adjust the shutter rate, it'll capture voice for you as well (can't vouch for the quality as of yet), is way less than $500, and if the 3x optical zoom isn't enough, they make ones with 5x for $130.

(I don't even know what a good optical zoom is. It's not something I look for in a camera xD)