You may laugh but I find the older Sony Mavicas cameras to be the
ticket.

Good macro, real zoom, auto/manual control, decent detail for photo
file size and you can take the disk with the photos and throw it in a
drawer for achival purposes.

I really don't understand why people feel that they need to shoot a
large megapixel file when a 1-2 megapixel photo will do just fine.

An example....

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2001_reviews/fd75.html

TMT