I work in the IT dept for the PA Dept of Transportation (PENNDOT for short) which is responsible for most of the roads and bridges in the state of pennsylvania. Routing work of many of our employees involves taking pictures of roads, bridges, tunnels, other structures (outdoors), and accidents. Becuase most of this work is for legal purposes, such as environmental concerns, accident lawsuits, construction and repair contracts, and inspections: I need to find a good camera (price isnt much of an issue) which has the following features: Date Imprint... Absolute Importance. Because most photo's are imported into legal documents every Photo must have the date appear in the photo itself, (not in the EXIF data). Decent Telescopic & Wide Angle Zooms (P&S or SLR are both acceptable) with built in flash A good name brand quality, (canon, nikon, olympus, sony, kodak, etc) Must take some type of 1-2Mb memory stick (CF, XD, SD, etc) for photo storage Will interface with a windows XP machine through USB cable. I've already looked at the Canon PowershotS80, and the Olympus SP-500UZ, both of which are good camera's but neither of which have the date imprint feature. if no-one has an answer here, perhaps there is a photographers forums i could ask at... any suggestions?
Sounds like a Canon Digital Rebel or Rebel XT would do what you want it to, all except for the date imprinting feature -- I don't know about that on the Rebel cameras. I can't believe that the PowerShots don't do that. I would think that every P&S camera does. Every one I've owned has done it. The option is probably buried in the settings somewhere.
If you prefer a P&S you might want to take a look at Nikon's CoolPix S4. I believe it does have a date/time stamp. I just purchased one for my wife to carry with her because of the small size and it was one of the very few that have a 10x optical zoom. That could help with the pictures of bridges and tunnels. In my experience once you get to digital zoom your quality starts to go downhill quick, thats why I didn't look for something with a large digital zoom. http://www.nikonusa.com/template.php?cat=1&grp=2&productNr=25533
