So SEN what camera do you use? I ask because I'm shopping for one. I have a dinky point and shoot made roughly ten years ago (an early Kodak EasyShare). The picture is really grainy, shakey and distorts quickly even with great lighting and a tripod. For example

That's a resized picture.

I'm looking for either a pint and shoot with amazing quality (ya right ) or a digital SLR that's easy to use...price range is about $500 for the camera, I understand lenses might cost more depending on what type I may get. Most of what I'll be doing is still life and posed. Suggestions?

I'm currently looking at the Canon T2i, but its a little out of my price range. XD

I have an older 7.2MP Sony Cybershot. Not great, but works for me.

Yeah, that's what you'll get when you ask "What camera do you use" rather than / alongside "What camera will you recommend" .

My camera has 5.0 MP. I'm pretty sure my phone has more than that at this point. And I was kinda expecting someone else to have a preferred camera XD Guess all the artists are in to digital art...

Megapixels don't really matter. It's just an easy-to-increase statistic that looks impressive. Whoa, 12 million pixels! Veeery useful.

I got an 8MP Olympus.

I use a Nikon D40. It's a pretty good DSLR because it can act as a point-and-shoot as well.

Me has none.
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This.
I personally have no use for pictures with more than 5 Megapixel. (2500x2000 pixel) Maybe 7MP if you plan on cropping and enlarging smaller parts of the picture. But usually that means you already made a mistake when taking the picture.
What matters for cameras is the lenses. Go for Zeiss if you can. A 2.5x zoom is equivalent to over 6x (2.5²) the number of Megapixels!

Actually...since most of my pictures are micros or pictures of small parts, that's why I want decent megapixels...It has nothing to do with messing up. XD And you have to admit...5 is beyond worthless. I think most cellphones have more.

That sounds delicious. I'll have to check it out...

I think you didn't understand my argument about the optics. Yes, decent MP is a plus but more like a nice to have extra and by no means the defining quality of a camera. Especially when you're shooting micros zoom is *much* more important than MP. I get better details with 5MP and 2x zoom than with no zoom and 12MP.
MP is only important if you photograph a large object which you want to see in its entirety and still want to see every little detail. For example you shoot a crowd of 100 people and want to be able to zoom in on any of the faces to see it more clearly.

It doesn't matter how many MP cellphones have since, as Centreri explained, there's micro-technology available that makes high MP counts easily possible to fit in cheap and small devices. But the reason why they usually make bad photos is because they have no lenses, usually no flash, terrible color space, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Nikon-Digital-18-55mm-3-5-5-6G-Zoom-Nikkor/dp/B000KJQ1DG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1279564937&sr=8-1

If you have the money for it, it's as much as $624 on Amazon right now (and lower from resellers). I think I paid between $700 and $750 for mine. From what I've heard, the D3000 is also good, but more expensive.

High megapixel count is only useful if the camera is good enough to provide that level of detail with the pictures and stick it on that resolution. From my experience with point and shoots, the level of detail of the camera is usually far behind the megapixel count. I can resize a photo I took in Norway to three times less pixels and still barely lose detail, because all it would do it smush four blurry pixels into one pixel, so barely any detail is lost.

I wish there was a number one could quote for picture detail. I have no idea how to buy a camera.