$250 to spend on a digital camera

[whoiswes]

I have $250 to spend on a digital camera.

I am a complete amatuer, but love taking pictures and taking interesting shots.

My fiancee is a zookeeper, so we'll have lots of animal shots, some from fairly far away. We will also be taking a fair amount of action and indoor shots too.

The A80 has a good rep as a solid 4MP camera, and I can pick one up from Amazon for ~$290 + $50 GC. Is there a better camera for the money???

Thanks in advance for the help. I've been doing my research, but wanted some opinions first.

 

[SeTeS]

Personally, I tend to favor canons. Currently I have an A70, my wife has an S400. I've owned canons and casios, and at work have used sonys, fujis, kodaks extensively.

One thing I like about my wife's S400 that the A70 lacks is a camera position sensor. I guess it's basically a tilt sensor that records the rotation of the camera in each images exif data. So when you get the pic onto your pc, any decent imaging software can automatically correct the image rotation. A timesaver if you're taking lots of mixed images.

Check out www.megapixel.net and www.dpreview.com for plenty of reviews and such.