Stylus 1010. Compact, 7x optical zoom, 10 megapixel.

I've looked at the "Tough" series , but they are all non-starters because of the limited (3.6x) zoom.

There seem to be plenty of the old Stylus 1010 cameras for sale, new and used, but she seems to use those up pretty quickly. Perhaps, though, I am being unfair. She killed the first one by dropping it four feet onto a tile floor, where it landed lens first. Even before she dropped it that camera looked like it had been through the wars... and lost. The second one died of electronic failure for no good reason. She was taking [terrible] pictures through the window of a moving car, and from one picture to the next the LCD just went away.

Interestingly, the LCD works and displays the menu options if I connect the USB cable to the camera to download pictures. There just seems to be no connection between the LCD and the actual photographic apparatus of the camera. Maybe I could bend a paperclip into a small rectangle and glue it to the top of the camera and she could use that as an optical viewfinder. My last desperate hope is to pull the battery out of the camera for a day and let it go completely dead (there is a capacitor or something that preserves basic time/date and most recent user settings) in the hopes that it will reboot the electronics and bring the LCD screen back to life.

I'm not putting too much faith in that.

tanstaafl.