Hah. I was a photographer in a past life, way before digital. I do have a digital camera now, it's the bottom of the line Nikon SLR (a D-40 which they stopped making about 5 years ago) Used FILM cameras used to hold value pretty good, but used digital stuff is worth about what used computers are. My point being, you can get a used SLR style camera for about what a new digital "point and shoot" would go for, but it will take much better pictures. My biggest issue with P&S's are the "lag time"- you hit the shutter button and it takes a couple seconds to actually fire, and by then your subject moved or whatever. An SLR will fire a lot faster, plus they just work better in lower light than P&S'es. If size is an issue (when isn't it?
) some SLR's are ridiculously small these days compared to the old film ones. I had to get an extra battery grip for my D40 because it was so small it was hard for me to use. You can get a "prime" (non-zoom) lens that's pretty small, it'll let much more light in than the zooms will, and the whole rig wiill fit in a pocket, so I've taken a "real" camera (body, lens, flash) into places my film gear would have been hard to get into, and gotten much better pictures than from a P&S (or a phone camera for that matter) Plus most digital cameras now have "image stabilization" so you can hand hold in much lower light than you used to be able to, I haven't had to use my tripod in years.
Of course this probably didn't answer any of your questions... as far as editing software, I've only ever needed to use the free one that comes with Microsoft Office ("MS Photo Editor"?) so I've never even felt the need to actually BUY a program for that. As far as printers go, for less than $100 you can buy a cheap printer, feed it "photo quality" paper and get decent results (just don't get them near moisture or direct sunlight!) But it's just so ridiculously cheap to upload your images to Snapfish or the like, and they mail you back prints on "real" photo paper. We truly are living in a "golden age" for photography, as far as ease and convenience. But I still miss my darkroom!
I've always looked at
www.kenrockwell.com for reviews and stuff, but apparently lots of people disagree with him, so take that for what it's worth.
Oh and as far as "megapixel count", a frame of 35mm film is the equivalent of about 25MP or so, and any place that can develop film will put your images on a CD (or the web) so you don't even need to BUY a digital camera if you don't already have one.
