Ok, you want a single digital camera that'll take care of every situation, from the open landscape to picking out the Loch Ness monster from afar. You'll find one here to meet the needs of a demanding traveler wanting top quality pictures for both printing and web use. The criteria? Long zooms (at least 5x) with a 28 mm equivalent wide angle (which travelers need for architectural photos, believe me) high resolution, and adequate portability (for compact travel cameras, see the link below).
1. Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3
Here's a new camera that goes beyond our specs in some areas. You get a 24mm wide angle vs. 28mm. This will really help those pictures of medieval buildings packed together along narrow lanes. Top speed at wide angle is f2.0, quite fast for a pocket camera, and it's even fast at the high end; the range is F2.0-2.8. As a bonus, you get 280x720 (30 fps) pixel movie capture. Weighs 265 grams. The negative? The Leica zoom tops off at 60mm, not really much of a telephoto. But that's what you sacrifice for a quality pocketable camera. For what it's worth, I don't use a long telephoto much on my trips to Europe.
2. Canon PowerShot G10
Canon's top "Prosumer" camera sports a 5x wide-angle (28mm) optical zoom lens with optical Image Stabilizer, face detection (and all the other modern bells and whistles), and a 14.7 Megapixel CCD sensor. The battery has been upgraded, so you should get lots of pictures out of a charge. The camera weighs 350 grams. The G10 has effective image stabilization, giving you a 3-4 stop advantage when photographing inside in low light where you can't use flash (as in most museums), According to Digital Photography Review.3. Nikon Coolpix P6000
Sporting a 4x 28-112 optically stabilized zoom, perhaps the thing that separates the Nikon from the herd is the built-in GPS receiver that feeds latitude/longitude information into the EXIF data of recorded images when the GPS function is enabled. The camera also has an Ethernet port for downloading pictures to Nikon's "my Picturetown" file sharing service.4. Olympus SP-565UZ
Need lots of lens? The 20x stabilized zoom on this 10 megapixel camera (26 mm - 520 mm) should let you zoom into the nose hairs of that whirling dervish in Istanbul. It also uses AA batteries, available just about anywhere.