Those of you who fancy point-and-shoots, listen up! The Pentax Optio V20 is on the way, further complicating your “what digital camera should I buy?” predicament. There’s but so many parameters to keep track of when it comes to point-and-shoots, namely pixel count, LCD size, and what kind of lens you’re working with. A quick scan reveals the V20 to be fairly capable.

For instance, it has eight “effective” megapixels, which, if all you’re doing is taking shaky “let-me-get-a-picture-of-us-together” photos should be just fine. (Serious or would-be photographers would do well to use an SLR—Pentax makes a few of those, too.) A 5X optical zoom lens (up to 25.5X if you can tolerate digital zoom), again, is more than adequate for a point-and-shoot. Oh, and a 3-inch LCD. Seems good to me, I guess.

Then you’ve got things like auto face-detection, digital shake reduction (fancy SLRs have that in the lens itself), and a handy movie recording mode.

She uses SD/SDHC cards—it has 51MB of built-in memory—and Amazon lists it as selling for $250.

A point-and-shoot, in other words.