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-ZR1
How about a 25-200 equivelent zoom in a pocketable camera? The 8x zoom is coupled to a 12.1 megapixel sensor that can also output 1280 x 720 movies. All this in a package measuring 3.9 x 2.2 x 1 inches and tipping the scales at a mere 5.6 ounces. Amazing. The downside? The lens isn't as fast as you might expect, given its range and the cameras overall size, but there's a lot of power in your pocket if the light is adequate.
2. Canon PowerShot G11 Long Zoom Digital Camera (5x)
Canon's top "Prosumer" yet small camera sports a 5x wide-angle (28mm) optical zoom lens with optical Image Stabilizer, face detection (and all the other modern bells and whistles) coupled to a 10 Megapixel CCD sensor, downsized from the G10 to give you lower noise. The camera weighs 13.2 ounces and is 4.4 x 3 x 1.9 inches in size. The G11 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 and many churches.) This is a camera for people serious enough about their travel photography to carry the weight, but who don't want to carry an SLR style camera.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 Stylus 7010
A very inexpensive camera that fits in your pocket and has a 28-196mm 7x lens? Yep, the stylus has quite the range for a pocket camera, and might be just the thing for those snapshots of you European vacation.