digital camera capabilities / was Re: 1000+ old computer in Canada, for sale

Richard wrote: I would if I had a digital camera. Looks like bear has it covered anyways. I've been wanting to get a digital camera but have to work up the enthusiasm to brave the shopping malls. Which reminds me I have a question for camera buffs. If I can justify asking this here, the main motivation for getting a camera is taking pictures of old equipment for addition to web pages. I'm not into photography in a big way, in my life I've probably taken more photos for tourists ("take photo please, just press button") than I have for myself. My main concern for taking close-up (oblique, not just plan view) photos of equipment is depth-of-focus. I know/figure it's mainly a function of aperture size (smaller --> longer depth-of-focus) and (optical) zoom (to minimize the ratio of focus-depth to lens-to-object distance). (And smaller aperture means less light which requires longer exposure.) If I have the above principles about right, the practical question(s) are: Is your typical $200 / 3*-optical-zoom / 5-MPixel camera good for this or does one have to go to something higher end with a special lens, etc.? It's subjective as to what's adequate of course, but I'd be interested in opinions. Is there a spec regarding the aperture range that I should be looking for? By way of example, I like this photo: http://www3.telus.net/~bhilpert/tmp/markusToshibaBC1624_diode.jpg although I guess one could say the depth of focus is not really that great (?). (It's the internals of a late-60s nixie desktop calculator (the diode farm is discrete logic gates, of course). It was sent to me by a fellow calculator collector a few years ago but I don't know what camera equipment was used.)