I had an older canon PowerShot which produced blurry images when you zoomed in, so when I wanted a slr, I went Nikon. I found that aa batteries are convienent, but I used lithium batteries to getter more life out of them. What about something like this?
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Pro...PIX-S9400.html
I like have the zoom, so it looks interesting to me.