I've taken about 12,000 digital photos in the last few years, mostly of my son, and mostly with a 3.2 megapixel Canon PowerShot S20. The S20 is a fine camera – good picture quality, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, has good battery life, and its 2,048 x 1,536 images are large enough to easily make 8x10 enlargements.

But the S20, and indeed all small point-n-shoot cameras I checked a few years back, has one exceptionally annoying problem: it made my baby look dopey. This is because just moments prior to the flash firing, the flash would fire [...]