I've been an SLR man (generally Pentax) for more than thirty years. My current one is a Pentax K-10, a fine camera (though it lacks some of the gimmicks that have entered the SLR world in the past few years, such as movie making and live view on the monitor). Several years ago I bought my wife a little Canon compact "super zoom" camera with a 20x lens. She consistently gets better pictures with it than I do with my SLR.
The other day I was in our local camera store on some other mission, and out of curiosity I asked my friend the clerk what it would cost me to get a camera roughly comparable to my wife's. He immediately pointed me to the Nikon Coolpix P520, which was marked down from $400 to $300. Then he tempted me with 12-months-same-as-cash financing. That did it. Chomp.
What a mind-blowing piece of equipment. It's last year's model, but my friend assures me that this year's is, if anything, not quite as well made. It has an 18 megapixel sensor and a 42x lens (4.3-180 mm). It weighs about a quarter as much as my DSLR.
I've been playing around with it today, and so far I'm extremely impressed. At first I was a bit irritated at the "manual," "quick start guide" of about 8 pages accompanied by a CD. When I loaded the CD into my computer, though, I could see the logic. The CD contains a genuine, honest-to-goodness manual of well over a hundred pages - all in English. (You can choose from English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.) The potential for this little contraption is seemingly endless. It has all sorts of "scene modes." (I'm anxious to try out the "museum" mode, in which it takes 9 images and chooses the sharpest of them.) The monitor screen can be swung out from the back of the camera and rotated 180 degrees. (Great for shooting above a crowd at airshows.) It has two tiny stereo microphones, and one tiny speaker, built in. Etc., etc., etc.
As a test, I took a shot of my little model of the frigate Hancock from across the room. When I put the shot on my 21" Mac and zoomed in on the figurehead, I could see the buttons and piping on John Hancock's coat. (That figurehead is less than an inch high - and I'd shot from across the room.)
It shoots movies. It shoots panoramas. You can set it up to recognize smiles in portraits. (Aim the camera at the person, push the shutter button, and the camera takes the picture as soon as the person smiles.) It's just unbelievable. And it cost about a quarter of what my SLR (body only) did.
Initially I was a little bothered by the fact that, out of the box, the only way to charge the battery is by tethering the camera to the charger. But the manual on the CD revealed that I can buy a separate charger for about $25.00.
So far I love this little thing. It'll never replace Olde Faithful the SLR, but for traveling and fun photography I think it's going to be great. And shortly I'll try it out on model photography. The smallest aperture is only f8, but given the way such optics work I suspect it will be pretty easy to keep the whole model in focus. (The thing does have a manual focus switch, and settings to blur the background, etc., automatically, for those into the "bokeh" effect.)
I don't know how widespread that $300 price tag is, but this camera is certainly worth checking out.