What is the best type of camera to use for digital pictures?

Canon EOS 20D
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos...

Best by far for the price...

Your public library will have a copy of Consumer Reports that will give you reliable information.

Also, pcworld.com has ratings on a number of electronics items, including digital cameras.

That depends on what you want to do with the pictures. If you're mostly going to post the pictures of family and friends to a WWW site you might have, or post them to other WWW pages, you really don't need anything expensive or fancy. A bottom-of-the-line $100 Kodak, costing about $100, with 3 or 4 mega-pixels, will work just fine for general pictures of people to post on-line. That sort of camera will do a very good job making 4" by 6" prints for scrap-booking and mailing to older relatives that aren't computer literate.

The sky is the limit if you want make a lot of larger prints, or do closeups, or wildlife. I'd suggest getting a camera with at least 5 mega-pixels and 8:1 optical zoom. There's a lot of brands cameras available at places like Wal Mart and Best Buy that are in that category - I suggest looking in a store to see what fits your needs and budget.