Originally Posted by MrFatbooty
I think the softness problem was limited to early batches of the A70 and A80 but has since been corrected.
If you're looking at the A80 then the S45 is definitely worth a look. It's just been recently discontinued but should be in pretty good stock at most stores. It has pretty much the same feature set as the A80 but is a good bit smaller and has a bigger LCD screen on the back.
Now if you're not going to be using the manual functions that the A80 and S45 offers, you really should look into the S400/S410. They're 4-megapixel versions of the popular Digital Elph form factor, with the S410 having a couple of dumb gimmicks added for the noobie set. The lens is not quite as good as the larger cameras but it still works very nicely as a point-n-shoot camera and has the same image sensor and image processor as its larger cousins. Might as well go with the smallest camera available if the manual functions of the larger ones aren't going to make a difference to you.
My Nikon Coolpix 2100 was stolen so I just bought a new camera. I got the S400 from Dell ($320 plus tax) and I am happy so far in the 10 minutes I have played with it. I just needed point and shoot functions. It was between this and the Sony P10. I figured I would go with the camera that I already had a spare 256 mb card for.