If you don’t already know what the terms depth of field, diopter adjustment, and F-stop mean, you should spend some time learning them and other important digital photography terms so you can make a well informed choice when you spend your money.
Consider what your primary use of the camera will be. It’s a waste of money to buy an 8 megapixel camera if you’re only going to print 4x6” snapshots or e-mail pictures of the children to grandma (not to imply that sending pictures to grandma is a waste of money!). Small “pocket size” cameras are very handy since you can always have them with you. But they typically lack some features that larger cameras often provide, such as more than about 2 or 3x optical zoom, or the ability to use standard AA NiMH batteries (although very few new cameras of any size now use AA batteries). Also, they may lack dedicated buttons for frequently used functions due to their small size. Be sure to allocate money for extra memory, batteries, and perhaps a charger in your budget. A few sites that discuss digital camera buying considerations are:
Before buying a digital camera, read what experts have to say about it and look at some sample pictures. All of the review sites listed here do detailed camera reviews and will help you learn which cameras excel or do poorly in certain respects compared others in their class.
After deciding on your budget and which features are most important to you, the wizard is very useful to quickly narrow down your search to a few cameras. Then the wizard can help refine the search by your answers to additional questions.