new camera!

finally bought a camera. first camera purchase (my old film-based camera was a gift) and a digital one at that. this is a canon SD-550 and i like it very much but i'm still in agony over deciding between this and the casio ex-z850. i actually bought the casio ex-z850 first, for $92 less than the jandr stated price, by bringing in a cnet printout with the lower price :) the manager said: "i'll give it to you for that price, but i'm not making any money off of it". yea right! anyway, i brought it home and then did more research, particularly with dpreview.com, kenrockwell.com, whatever other sites i could google up. this is what i concluded:
1. resolution - the SD-550 at 7.1 megapixels has noticeably better resolution than the casio ex-z750 at 7.1(or 7.0?) megapixels. but the casio ex-z850 has worse resolution than the ex-z750. the only problem is that the SD-550 has a tendency to moire more so than the ex-z750. this is slight and for the vast majority of shots it wouldn't bother me. winner: canon
2. color - the SD-550 shows more vibrant truer color (closer to what you see in real life) than ex-z850. of course, you can adjust the ex-z850 to capture truer color, but who wants to do that for every shot, and your colors still end up not as vibrant. the sd-550 does have a slight tendency to posterize but it is extremely slight, and the camera does allow you to show colors in more neutral tones. i would prefer my colors to be slightly more vibrant than be required to adjust them for every shot. i looked at countless photos at flickr.com taken by each camera and it seems that with most users and in most pictures, the ones taken by canon were less washed-out and more pleasing to the eye. winner: canon
3. zoom - the canon sd-550 allows for further zooming in (up to 5 cm away from subject) than the ex-z850 (up to 10 cm away from subject). at the tele end, i believe the ex-z850 gives you more but as you can always stitch together landscape photos (in both cameras), i prefer the canon for its macro aspect
4. looks - ex-z850 hands down. the sd-550 is beige. who makes beige cameras? also the curvy end is pointless
5. size - ex-z850 is light and slimmer. same height and length. ex-z850 wins
6. features - also ex-z850 definitely. in one hour i learned to use all the features in the sd-550. granted, it will take a lot longer to master them, but i feel i have my hands tied in the creativity department.

though, it is easier to take what i consider good pictures with the canon - i find that less than 75% of the time (indoor, outdoor, low-lighting all considered) i need to tweak the settings to take the picture i want. consider that and the fact that most good pictures are taken at the spur of the moment, without pausing for adjustment, the features end up being not such a big deal in the long run. the canon beat out the ex-z850 in the more important aspects, so canon it is. i feel better having written this.