Yes. Just buy one from a camera manufacturer, not an electronics company, so you get a decent lens. You can get a $200 camera today that is better than the $1000 cameras from 5 years ago.

I use a 3.2 mp Sony that I bought off eBay for $300 (two years ago) that does slightly above-average 8x10 prints (in other words, pretty damn good for consumer). I've printed up to 18x24 at marginal quality, too. Oddly, most shots end up looking really good behind glass - not acrylic - framing.

Everything <A HREF="http://www.supdogg.com/photo.htm">here</A> was taken with that camera.

even something like this or this?

Here's a $150 camera that should take good pictures. It has a 3x optical zoom lens and is 3.2 megapixels. Kodak is no Nikon or Canon, but they have been making cameras for 100 years.
Kodak Easyshare

If you go up to the $200 - $250 level, then you start getting into the Canons, Nikons, etc. with lots of nice features like more image control options, better zoom lenses and more megapixels.

Taking good pictures is 90% photographer and 10% equipment. Look at footfootfoot and his paint can pinhole cameras.

I never heard of Jenoptic. Why are you looking on e-bay? Don't you have on-line vendors in England that will sell you new stuff under warranty?

I don't know anything about this seller, but here's a camera available to you in the UK that I would trust more than a "Jenoptic" from some random seller on e-Bay.

The Nikon is a good bet as a camera, it has 4 megapixel, a 3x optical zoom lens, which is pretty good, and the price is in the same ballpark as the "Jenoptic."

:question: I don't have a clue.

I don't want to spend that much money either, I was hoping to find a really cheap bargain for £20. I take it at that price I'm going to end up with photos like this...

...because you can buy the same gear, also new, with warranty, off ebay? Don't you have eBay shops in the US or something?

Well, for a printed photo to look really nice, you want to go with a minimum of 300 pixels/inch. My 8mp camera produces an image of 3456x2304, which is just about exactly 8x10 at 300 pixels/inch. When I want to go any larger, I have to sacrifice quality. My 3mp Olympus was great for 5x7s, but anything bigger started to look grainy unless I proceessed it with some fractal-based photo enlarging software, and even then it wasn't perfect.

Another advantage to high-megapixel cameras is the ability to crop the photo quite a bit, but still end up with a print-worthy image.

My first digital was a 2.1mp Olympus C-700UZ with 10x zoom, which was a great camera despite the low megapixels. I then upgraded to the newer 3mp Olympus C-730UZ, also with a 10x zoom, which I used until recently... I got a bonus at work, and used it to buy an 8mp Canon Digital Rebel XT. This digital SLR is awesome, though it will take me some time to master its features.

to a degree it depends how your printing, it's is a contone process you can get away with quite a bit more. But once again, how often are you printing at even 8x10? In terms of image quality a decent lens and sensor size are remarkably overlooked factors. If you think the RebelXT is nice try the 1DsMkII ;).

I do make large prints more frequently than most people, because I sell some of mine. Not a lot, but some... I've sold copies of about five 8x10s and one 11x14 in the past six months. Mostly I use the Costco print lab, because they produce good, inexpensive enlargements.

If I had more money than I knew what to do with, I'd seriously give one a go. Hell yeah.

I thought 5mp was very good to 8x10 and 8mp was very good to 11x14. One reason I want the zoom is to cut down on cropping and blowing up, which is basically doing on a computer what 'digital zoom' does.

I thought 5mp would give me 8x10's indistinguishable from film if I did not crop and blow up the image.

I find that on Ebay, items get bid up higher than can be found in Internet sites dealing with refurbished items.

Try www.overstock.com for digital cameras. They have a lot of choices of refurbished cameras.

It depends on how picky you are about clarity. It's always subject to some debate, but it is usually said that "photo quality" prints are 300dpi, as described by this link, which was just one that I quickly googled.

True, the human eye can barely detect the difference between 300dpi and 275dpi; but there is a difference, and the more you drop below 300dpi, the more it becomes noticable.

For instance, images from my old 3mp camera are 2048 x 1536, which is 5x7 at 300dpi. If I print an 8x10, it'll be 204dpi. It still looks nice, but the pixels can be seen when scrutinized. Forget about 11x14 unless you have some good software to process and enlarge the photo.

At 5mp, you should get very nice 8x10s if you don't crop, and that is more than plenty for the average user. Frankly, 3mp is more than plenty for the point-and-shoot types, as long as you don't mind slightly pixelly enlargements... it just depends on how picky you are about that sort of thing. I have lots of optical zoom on my cameras, but I still crop sometimes, when I see that a crop would make for better composition.

And note that _film_ varies a lot. 35MM Kodak "MAX" film with (according to one photographer) "grain the size of beachballs" is going to give a much lower resolution print than Fuji NPC160, for instance.

Digital won't ever be indistinguishable from film; if nothing else, the artifacts (such as grain) are different.