Hi Rick,
I went through the same "scenario" as you, a few weeks back. Had to decide on a digicam as well, wanted good zooming capabilities as well...
In fact, I ended up with the same list of cameras as given some posts before this one. I started comparing them on this site, and reading a lot of posts in the forums. When I compared them all, the UZi (Olympus C-2100 UZ) stood out, partly because of it's price, partly because of the UZi enthousiasts on this site, but also because of the rating on image quality (9/10, a rating unseen on all the other reviewed cameras of the same type/price). So I bought that one.
I did not consider the 100RS because of 3 main reasons:
-I wanted to be sure to be able to print my pics at A4 (letter) size and still have a perfect result. The 2M pixel allows me to do so, but I was unsure that that the 1.5M pixel of the 100RS was enough; a friend of mine has a 1.5M pixel (no RS100 though), and I don't like the results of his pics when enlarged to A4 size. Of course, it can also be that this is not because of the size of the chip, but just because his camera is not a good one...
-It's main advantage (shooting 15fps) was not at all important to me, as I would hardly use that feature. So I rather went for the bigger chip.
-And another thing which made me not decide on the 100RS is that it is not fully reviewed here by Phil (yet), so I was unsure if the image quality would get the same rating as the UZi (being a complete dumbass when it comes to knowledge on digicams, I did not want to take any risk)...
Whatever you decide, if it's one of these 2 cameras, then I think you will be pleased as it seems there are a lot of enthousiasts for both of them.
One last thing: you say "zooming digitally is important to me". It seems that you are not aware of the difference between optical & digital zooming. The difference between both is about the most important thing I learned on this site. Let me explain this to you (if you already know, forgive me to "act as the teacher", but I feel this is very important)...
-Digital zoom: you zoom in on a subject but when you press the shutter button, the chip still takes a normal picture (as if it would do when not zooming at all), and then it only retains the (pixels of the) subject that you zoomed in on; so it "throws away" all the unnecessary pixels "around your subject". This means that your final picture contains far less pixels than your chip can handle. So the more you zoom ,the worse the less pixels, the less quality of your picture.
-Optical zoom: you zoom in on a subject and when you press the shutter button, the chip takes a picture of the subject you zoomed in on, still using it's whole chip. No pixels (and thus quality) are/is lost when zooming optically.
This made me understand a couple of things:
-A bigger chip does not necessarily mean better pics. A 3M pixel/3x digital zoom produces on average far worse pictures than a 2M pixel/10x optical zoom.
-Spending more on a camera with a bigger chip (the bigger the chip, the more expensive they seem to get) could be useless if that camera can only zoom digitally.
So your sentence should be "zooming OPTICALLY is very important to me".
Ciao,
J.
