Canon Powershot A70

Phil Askey from Digital Photography Review has reviewed the A70 (amazon) and has done a much more thorough job than I have time to do.
Some quick additional thoughts, the camera is excellent and for the money highly recommended, especially if you are familar with the Canon SLR layout. Simple and straightforward to use and also offering sufficient manual control over white point and aperture or shutter speed. It is also ready to shoot quite quickly from poweron and doesn't suffer too badly from shutter lag, you tend to get what you intend to take, except in really fast moving events.
Some caveats, the lens had barrel distortion at the minumum focal length, but this is quite common. The screen needs to really be read straight on and suffers in bright sunlight.
You really need to budget for rechargable batteries and additional memory (128MB compact flash) too.
The camera offers some fun and useful additional features, movie mode being one, but the panoramic mode is quite well thoughtout and I've used it several times to take scenics.
One of the better 2-300 pound cameras around at the minute. It has replaced the 35mm compact that I used to carry, but I'm still taking my EOS 30 if I intend to take real pictures. A perfect take anywhere camera.