Things to look for in a decent digital camera.
1. As large an image file as you can afford. The larger the image file the better the image will look when printed. Its easy to make them smaller for the net and such, but if you want prints then you need megapixels.
2. As much image storage as you can afford. More storage equals taking more images before you need to download the memory card/stick/ or diskette.
3. Look for cameras with optical zoom instea dof digital zoom. Optical zoom uses glass lenses to zoom. Digital zooms crop the image and make the pixels bigger to zoom in on the image, resulting in a poorer image.
4. If you buy a decent camera now then you will be able to do more with it as you learn to use it.
I shoot a lot of sports and nature shots with an Olympus C2100UZ 2.1 mpixel camera. It has an effective 38-380 optical zoom made with Canon glass and Canon's image stabilization. The digital zoom is up to 3X so the effective zoom can reach over 1100mm, but there is a siginificant drop off in image quality at the extreme zoom. Pictures shot in SHQ mode are 16" X 20" and make truly excellent 8" x 10"s from WalMart digital 1 hour processing. I wish the image file was larger, but the camera offered the full SLR functions I wanted for motorsports photography. I have two 128MB Smartmedia cards for storage.
I have some pics at
http://www.geocities.com/apeximages
Hope this helps, Kevin