My Canon A630 is among the finest point and shoot cameras ever made and will also set up manually, battery life is excellent, and the picture quality is good enough for professional work... it has sometimes been confused as being a film camera by virtue of the picture quality. It uses 4 AA batteries and Sd cards for storage so nothing proprietary there.
I also have an 8.2 MP Kodak that I can slip in my pocket that takes very decent pictures (nice lenses) but is nothing close to the level of the Canon which rarely needs any image correction... the Kodak also depends on a charger but has really excellent battery life.
Kodak... under perfect lighting conditions.
The Canon... just pointing and shooting on auto (with no correction) in the moment.
