To answer the questions in particular, I use a regular compact camera for both movies and stills, It is a Fuji Finepix F31fd.
I prefer not to use flash when photographing anything and Fuji Finepix has always been way ahead of the pack in terms of the quality and light sensitivity of its photo receptors. And at a very reasonable price -- I think I bought my camera for $150.
I don't give a fig for the supposed resolution of a camera -- which all manufacturers fight over. More crappy pixels doesn't make a photo better. A lesser number of good ones does.
What do I mean by good ones? My camera will shoot a dinner party in candlelight, with no flash, and the resulting image will look like a Rembrandt, rather than a sand painting of the inside of a tunnel populated by ghosts.
Its resolution is far above that required by the 640 x480, or 800 x600 typical useful photo printed on this forum, and more than enough for an 8-1/2" x 11" high resolution photo print.
Large numbers of pixels are a pain in the neck in fact, unless you are a professional doing commercial poster sized high resolution printing for an art show. There's little more annoying online experience than waiting an age to download email and finally finding out that a relative has mailed me a boilerplate "having a great time" message with thirty 12 megapixel photos of their recent visit to the zoo. I have only a DSL connection here in rural Vermont.
And since to display them my computer must internally reduce them to less than a tenth that size to completely fill a screen anyway, what a waste of bandwidth, storage capacity and time.
I also don't pay any attention to the supposed zoom ratio of a camera. Most manufacturers post their zoom ratio as a combination of digital zoom and optical zoom. To me optical zoom is the only one that counts. Digital zoom just means that a microprocessor in your camera has multiplied the number of pixels it received from the photocell by some number, and then smoothed things out. Maybe.
Thus a low priced low capacity photocell, combined with a limited mechanical zoom mechanism, both producing a limited quality image , can have that poor image scaled up to an amazing number of pixels -- thus satisfying the advertising thirst for "high" resolutions, and "high" zoom ratios available.
Fuji, for some reason decided to go against the grain, and manufacture their own high quality, high sensitivity cells, provide believable numbers for actual resolution, and optical zoom and use high quality optics in reasonably priced compact cameras. Their light sensitivity was always at the head of the pack. I've owned 3 Fuji cameras over the years, and they have taken superb photos in all conditions.
They also take great movies, and with a 1 gig card, my present camera will record up to a half hour at 640 x 480, with low light capability -- and that's plenty for posting on forums like these. In fact I have to reduce size with software at that, or it would take me forever to upload. DSL upload speeds are typically about one tenth of download speeds.
My camera is no longer available -- though possibly obtainable through a refurbisher. But the compact Finepix F-series line is what I've stuck with, and haven't been disappointed so far.
