digital cameras

I've been seriously considering buying a digital camera for some time now. I assume others on this list already have these in order to photograph some of their computer items, so i thought I would ask which features are most important. And which features you really wish you'd spent extra money for. It seems to me that a macro-focusing feature, which allows you to manually focus at very close range would be very useful. Or can you get by with a 3X optical zoom in order to get detailed shots of computer boards, or the insides of a computer, etc? How important is high resolution? Is a 640x480 camera with 10X zoom much more useful than a 1280x960 with 3X zoom and no macro focusing? I'm really only interested in photographing computers and circuit boards, I assume anything that can handle that to my satisfaction will be able to handle the occasional photo of my niece and nephews, etc. -Lawrence LeMay lemay(a)cs.umn.edu