Camera for Galapagos (1 Viewer)

Hello, I'm very lucky and am going to the Galapagos at the end of June. Currently I own a compact zoom camera (not very good) and a 1.3 mp Fujifilm with 3x optical zoom (surprisingly good for £40 second hand!). I am thinking of investing in a new camera to take with me to the Galapagos. I thought as I have no experience of an SLR camera it would be prudent for me to buy a digital camera such as the Sony p10 which are light, small and can have filters and lenses fitted. Bearing in mind that on the Galapagos most things are quite near to you anyway the 2.5x telephoto lense and the macro lenses should serve me well there.

Has anyone any thoughts on this camera or any suggestions for better cameras? I know Fujifilm do some 6x optical zoom cameras but I don't know whether this would be necessary or whether the 3x optical zoom would suffice. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated but please remember I won't understand anything too technical!

I Think you need to look at what you will need on the Galapagos in the way of batteries etc.
Personally I would go for a camera that takes standard AA batteries take 3 or 4 sets of NMh rechargables+ as many packs of Duracells. I assume you can recharge somewhere?. Charger.
Plenty of Mb of memory cards, Compact Flash?. Do you own a Laptop?,Can you dump to someone elses laptop with a CD writer?. Card reader?.
Now start looking for a camera!. There are lots out there. I have a Canon Powershot A80, Good battery life!. 3x Optical zoom. I like it. But what do you want out of it?.
HTH

I was lucky enough to go to the Galapagos last year-you will love it;I really want to go back! As for a camera to take,I shot with digital slrs,but if you go for a digital compact I'd go for something with a good range of focal lengths on the lens-I found myself shooting with a 70-200 zoom alot of the time,often with a teleconverter (you don't want to get too close to rampaging bull sea elephants!).You'll also need something decent at the wide end for landscapes and close-ups of birds and crabs-yes you really can get very close to some subjects.Something like a Fuji S5000,Olympus C-750,or HP 945 might be a good choice.Alan is right about power and storage space,especially the latter.If your boat doesn't have a power point to recharge batteries then take a film camera,simple as that.For storage,if you don't want to lug a laptop around then you'll either need loads of memory cards or a portable storage device.I took an Innoplus 30Gb Phototainer(the Smartdisk Flashtrax is identical,and cheaper).Something like a Vosonic XS Drive/Nixvue Vizor will also do the job.These things eat power too,so you really need to run them off your boat's powerpoint.If you get one of these,make sure it can read whatever memory card your camera uses.I took about 8 Gb of photos in 3 weeks (thats about 4,000 shots)!
Hope this helps,and I'm sure you'll have a fantastic trip.
Best wishes,Pete

Right thanks - lots of information there. You are right that the first thing I must do is to find out whether there is electricity on board. I did ask the operator today and she said she would find out for me. I didn't realise that you could get Phototainer's. They are pretty expensive though but I guess not as expensive as buying that much memory.
I have to ring the operators tomorrow so should find out then. I'll probably have more questions then so please be patient with me!
Thanks for your time,
Karen