Hiya. I am new here and would like some advice. I am currently using an Olympus E10. I find it easy to use as the controls feel right with a nice thumbwheel to change settings. It is also good at close ups (not true macro but fine for my purposes). f2 to 2.4 lens.

The problem is that I am looking for an improvement on the 4mp it delivers. Looking for 8 or more. All the DSLRs seem to have much slower lenses and I am not convinced about the ability to focus down to about 16cm or less.

The Canon EOS 350d & 20d are tempting as I have a couple of old Canon lenses from an EOS 10 (way before d).

If I could get an Olympus E10/20 with 8mp I would go for that.

Any suggestions as to what I should be looking at.

Typical photos are close ups of leaves with ice or frost on them, small flowers such as daisies or whatever grabs my eye when walking & landscapes.

Thanks

Jezza, I dont have a recommendation for a camera but i am curious why you want to go to 8mp? Unless you are doing great enlargements, 4 mp is fine. I continue to use my 4 mp digicam alongside my 20d. mp is not really a good reason in most cases to upgrade. Usually its other issues that make it worthwhile for example better low light performance, less shutter lag, immediate wakeup, faster more accurate focus lock and so on. Dont get caught up in the mp race as its almost all hype. Have a good reason before you spend your hard earned money Just a thought.

Agree with tumrumble here. The rating of a camera by megapixels is a consumer driven idea that more megapixels is better. In geneal the larger the image sensor the more pixels you can put there, but cramming as many in as possible means generating more noise. This will obviously increase as technology improves. I guess if you want an 8Mp camera for macro work your main aim is detail, so you ideally want a camera that has a larger image sensor, which most of the higher end cameras have. I would personally opt for a DSLR, simply because of the flexibility you have with lenses. But have you looked at any of the camera review sites like dpreview.com. They do extremely good reviews on virtually every camera.
Don