Thanks guys - actually I'm doing a little research for my dad who runs a photo restoration business so I'm not sure whether the Sigma will work for him or not, but it looks like a good recommendation to save some $$$.
No cameras for me, but I did buy a new camcorder to capture the new arrival. As an aside, digital camcorders have come a long ways in recent years. I picked up a
Canon Vixia HF10. All solid-state memory, high capacity flash cards... pretty amazing to be able to get 2 hours of full 1080p video on a 16GB flash card. The real beauty is that I can either take the card straight to my PS3 (using a USB card reader) and watch the videos in their full HD glory or I can copy them to my hard drive and stream them to the PS3 over the video networking features in the PS3 and it looks equally good. All this from something about the size of a Coke can. Very fun stuff.
