I have the Canon S3 IS (as does Barnes) and it's a very good camera. Big arse zoom and lots of good features as you get more into manual mode and other options.
One added feature I actual use a bunch is it's good VGA quality video. I can see this being handy for taking quick video memories of the rugrat. The vids are no where near the quality of an actual video cam but they aren't half bad on a TV and are good on the computer monitor. I think you can get a 1gb video which is about 9 mins in time. Having sat through really long (read: boring) videos, having clips of a few minutes in length are more than enough for most to sit through.
The image stabilization on the Canon and a number of other cameras is a good feature.
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