heres a decent comparison of battery types... http://www.thomas-distributing.com/articlelive/articles/14/1/Rechargeable-Batteries-Comparison

 

Personally I would avoid sonys. They obviously still have the problem with the battery and using a proprietary media format (though memory stick is not as bad as it used to be).

I guess at this point, I should ask what attracted you to this camera? Maybe then it would be easier to dispense advice.

 

hmm i'm not 100% sure.., but i'm about 70% sure i was reading reviews about the original fujiam, they said something about the a sony DSC-w70 being comparable...and lookin at them i ended up at the dsc100.

Also was kinda sketchy on the fuji cam about the LCD display taking up the whole back of the camera leaving no place to hold it.

All in all, since about 4 outta 6 people asked about cameras had good experiences with sony's while the other two hadn't tried sonys, but had good things to say about canon's. So that helped my choice.

Lastly i'm struggling to find a review that had anything bad to say about that sony, whereas with the fuji...i found a couple of con's about it. What have you heard or experienced that was so bad about the sony's?

 

No, NiMH isn't just for high end cams, hell, I use them in my remote control cars.

 

Dont worry about LCD size. Bigger is way better. On a small screen, an image can look OK, but when you get it on computer, you realize that it is way out of focus. The bigger the scree, the more accurate the preview.

In terms of reviews try these ones for the Sony and for the Canon SD700. DC Resource is probably my favourite digital camera site.

The Sony looks like it takes solid pictures, but you are giving up some features for the resolution. The Canon is lower res, but has image stabilization (the Sony looks like it does really well with very high ISOs, so that compensates for this to some degree), the amazingly addictive my colours option, and takes really smooth, natural looking pictures and the memory will be cheaper. The Sony is higher res, longer battery life, comes with more memory, probably cheaper because its an older model (though you could get the Canon SD550)

I dont specifically have a problem with Sony, its just that whenever I have looked for a new camera, there is always something more interesting that the Sony. At the bottom of each review, you will find a list of similar cameras to help with your search as well.

I find that as I go, I'm also putting more emphasis on manual controls. With the ability to delete a bad shot on a digicam, it becomes really easy to experiment. After that experimenting, manual control begin to take more importance, and Canon usually has a reasonable number of controls. Sony on the other hand is usually more basic, or in some cases have none at all.

 

One more thing, the Fuji F30 is described on DC Resource like this:

"the F30 may be the best compact camera on the market. It offers great picture quality, phenomenal high ISO performance, a really nice LCD display, manual controls, and a VGA movie mode. Did I mention the great battery life?"

That may be one to consider too.