Originally Posted by
ct-vt-trekker
I'm surprised nobody mentioned cell phone cameras. If you ride with a cell phone you may want to look into upgrading. My Motorola Droid X is an 8 Megapixel Camera with HD video capability. It takes great outdoor photos. Since getting this phone I found no need to carry an additional camera even though I have several to choose from.
The only negative I found is the CCD in this phone doesn't take good interior or very low light conditions as well as my Sony camera.
Edit- I forgot this is the touring forum. A smartphone might not be the best chioce if you will be away from electrical power for more than a couple of days.
At best, cell phone cameras equal to lowest end compact cameras. Most of them just take bad pictures, no matter how many megapixels they have(megapixels rarely tell anything about picture quality).
You get to see lots of interesting and beautiful things when touring so I definitely wouldn't limit myself to cell phone cameras. For my next tour I'm going to use Canon SX130 IS. It has 12x optical zoom, 28-336mm focal range, uses batteries and shoots 720p videos. It is slighty larger than ultra-compact cameras but I guess it's tolerable. I would otherwise bring my DSLR but it definitely weights too much and takes far too much space.