Camera + Scanner: Recommendations?

[WLC-1989]

Hello everyone, I think I has best split this post in two:

1) Camera: I'm in drastic need of one right now; the last time I looked was about two years ago, when I was interested by the Ricoh R5. My price range is in the region of < £180, though I'm prepared to go a little further if there was something really worthwhile for that bit extra.

Really, I'm looking for something with great optical zoom, (7x or more), great image quality and perhaps some of the more advanced features one might expect to find on a DSLR. From the cameras I've looked at so far, I think I'm right in saying I won't find a DSLR for £200, so what, in your experience, is the next best model?

Just as an added extra, I do miss the manual zoom I had on an old film camera; do you know of any digital camera in my price range which provide that kind of functionality? It seems to be a SLR perk as far as I can see.

2) Scanner: I have previously used a CanoScan which provided 'ok' scans, but since moving to Vista x64, I can no longer find the drivers. Furthermore, I am looking to scan in quite a lot of 35mm negatives to digitise family photo albums for safe-keeping. From my research so far, it would seem that the Epson V500 is the best one available for < £170. However, I'm wondering if anyone can tell me how significant the quality difference is between this model and the V350... Is it worth double the amount of money, in your experience?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[Bobster]

optical zoom doesn't mean a thing, you can get a camera with a 10mm lens and then 7x optical zoom would mean you went from 10-70mm

saying you won't find a DSLR under 200, is true but if you shop around on ebay you might find a bargain, alot of people are upgrading their old DSLR's atm, i just picked up a 20D with 21,000 shots on the clock for 260..

if you're looking for an SLR style camera, Fujifilm are a good bet, Fuji's referb site do some great deals

Scanner - V500 is in the same ball park as the old 4490 (which i have) and it gives great results and i had it running under Vista64 (until i swapped back to X64)