Depth of Focus (was: digital camera capabilities / was Re: 1000+

Thanks for all the replies and info. I get the feeling I'll be OK with something fairly ordinary. I realised the resolution of even low end cameras these days was more than adequate for the task, decent electronics being inexpensive; but suspected that on the optics end corners would get cut, variability might be limited, and design targets would be for taking photos of groups of people 10-20 feet away. I was forgetting that lots of people like to take close-up photos of flowers. I found a tripod while bushwhacking over a bluff in the woods in the middle of nowhere a few months ago, apparently someone had made the effort to go way off trail to take photos and had forgotten it, so that issue is covered. I did experiment briefly with a friend's under-$100 unit: it fails to focus well at all, may not be a design problem but perhaps a production-quality issue.