hey... it's getting close to the departure time of my roadtrip, and it's been suggested that i bring something along besides my SLR manual.
Why? No other camera is going to take better pictures. The cost of the new camera is going to more than offset any savings in film and processing. If you're comfortable with the manual SLR and it delivers the results you want, take it.
I still shoot film, the medium hasn't died yet. I reserve the digitoy for when I need extreme portability (mountain biking) or I need images immediately. I use film for important work (family, vacation, etc).
FWIW, I have a Fujifilm Finepix Z10fd. It does great outdoors, but only so so indoors with flash. Sometimes it gets a great shot, other times the flash destroys the scene. It's big feature and benefit is the size. With a 2gig memory card, I can fit over 500 shots at full rez. The battery is good for 250ish shots, but recharges in less than 2hrs and is very small (easy to carry several). I don't know if it has a car charger, but you could run the AC charger off a small 100watt inverter. I got mine online for $96 shipped.
Chris
I've had a Canon Powershot A620 for a while - it does what I want it to, and was arguably the best camera
in its price range at the time I bought it. I like the fact that it's powered by conventional AA batteries.
You can find plenty of digital camera reviews on-line; here's a place to start:
http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/allreviews.php
That's one of the reasons I got my Powershot A630 a little over a year ago. 4xAA batteries so I can get 'em at the 7-11 or hotel convenience shop (if my rechargable AAs die, that is - and I have about 7 sets, which cost me about $30 all told IIRC), large twist-and-flip LCD screen on the back, 8MP resolution, and while it's not an ultra-compact by any measure, it's not even close to being a boat anchor either. 4x optical zoom is not fantastic, but I'd never owned anything with more than 3x previously, and the digital zoom added to optical doesn't start getting too obnoxious until about 6.4x combined. As mentioned, a 2GB SD card will hold several hundred pictures at max res and quality (mine will not take RAW-format pictures, which I don't mind - I'm not a professional or even a really serious amateur photographer). Not too shabby for well under $200 at time of purchase, I thought.
Low-light performance is not great (I understand that to be a common problem with digital point-and-shoots - I hear Fujis tend to be slightly better in that regard, though I don't know why), and the shutter lag is annoying, although the 630 is worlds better than my older 3.1MP supercompact Pentax Optio S (which, to be fair, fits into an ALTOIDS TIN - I could take it ANYWHERE) in that regard. Those are really the only things I wish were better, and there's no digital point-and-shoot I've seen or heard of that's enough better than this one to make me replace it.
I second the recommendation for DCResource.com's reviews - I used that site extensively while researching prior to my own purchase.