I’m currently using a two-year old Kodak EasyShare. 3.2 megapixels, 4x optical zoom, uses AA batteries and writes to both internal memory and to the SD card. It does everything I want…I’m not a particularly sophisticated user…with two exceptions.

First, it’s butt-slow to boot.

Second, it takes a long time to write down the picture and return control to me for a follow-up shot.

I can deal with #2 by putting it in ‘sport’ mode, where it takes a series of frames and buffers them to internal memory, then writes them out to the card, but I often forget to do that.

What I’d like is a fairly modest consumer-grade camera, with roughly the same characteristics as my current one, but that has a very quick start-up cycle and a much faster write-to-memory time. Is this possible? Recommendations? What should I look for in camera specs?