Getting myself a camera

[AsphaltPlanet]

Optical zooms are definitely better than their digital counterpart, but on most inexpensive point and shoot cameras, the optical zoom comes at the expense of the aperture settings.  It's not rare to see aperture settings close to 7 at the telephoto end of a less expensive point and shoot camera.  The reduction in light associated with such a small aperture setting is going to have a significantly negative impact on image quality, which is probably not that far off from what a good smartphone with a good image sensor can do with a digital zoom.  So I guess the point I was trying to make is, if you already have a good smart phone, you're probably not going to get much better photos with a low end P&S camera than you can already get now.