Canon PowerShot SD 550. Now, the screen on the back is cracked and would make a great OpArt poster, but is useless, so I'm stuck with whatever settings were in there before it broke.

How did it break? I was carrying it in my pocket.

 

My 2c-worth: Based on my experience with a 4Mp Ricoh pocket camera:
- totally avoid digital zoom - the quality is horrid
- therefore the camera has to have optical zoom. 3x works well enough for most needs
- can print up to A4 for home use quite well
- Ricoh put lots of SLR-type adjustability into their pocket camera, so that helps
- it's cheap if it breaks, or gets rained on, etc.
- I still carry it everywhere - a few of my best photos were unplanned.

So - I can believe 7Mp would be a reasonable limit for good sense in a pocket camera.

I agree with rrcaniglia about leveraging high resolution / high pixel count to zoom in - I do this on my DSLR and it saves me having to swap lenses - or, as recently, capturing birds landing when I couldn't be sure just where the subject would be! But this is with a good, big lens and a good camera. I can believe what others say, that a pocket camera doesn't deliver the quality to be able to do this no matter how high the pixel count.

All IMHO of course!

 

Keep in mind that more megapixels isn't necessarily better either (actually almost never with P&S cameras). Once you try to squeeze more megapixels out of such small sensors you end up with photos that can't take pictures with ISO higher than 200 without having ridiculous amounts of noise in them. You really need to be able to shoot with ISO 400 for low light photography (without a flash or tripod), and sometimes more.

I don't have any recommendations for a budget like yours, but I definitely wouldn't try to get something with 13 megapixels that isn't a DSLR. I have a Canon Rebel XSi with 12 megapixels and it has a significant amount of noise with any shot above ISO 400, and that's with a DSLR (much larger sensor).

If you're looking for the best bang for your buck, try a Canon G9.

 

I got a Kodak z1285 but I might take it back I get my money back if I return in 30days so that's what i might do. I'm just looking for a point and shoot between 150-200. I bought it last friday, I'm not really a fan of it now.