looking for good compact camera w/ wide-angle lens

[arghman]

I like my Panasonic FZ20 very much, but it's not good at fitting landscapes into the camera lens (wide-angle limit = 36mm equiv), and I'm heading out to Glacier National Park in a little over a week.

any suggestions for a small secondary camera that would be a good complement? Looking for wide-angle lens in the 20-28mm range, 3x optical zoom or better, SD card, >= 4megapixel, and it would be nice to get something that uses AA batteries so I don't have to carry around yet another charger.

edit: just searched on dpreview for small wideangle cameras, other than Ricoh or Samsung which I don't trust, the only ones I found that were wider than 28mm were these:
Kodak V705 (23mm)
Panasonic DMC-FX500 (25mm)
Panasonic DMC-FX35 (25mm)
again, thoughts/advice wanted...

 

[DougPaul]

The Canon SD870 IS goes down to 28mm eFL. It unfortunately lacks a viewfinder. The prior model, the SD800 IS includes a viewfinder and might still be available.

Doug

 

[David Metsky]

You can trust Ricoh, those are excellent cameras, but fairly hard to find. The Kodak is a kludgy beast, with dual lenses. I'd drop that one from your list as well.

Do you want an optical view finder? The Canon SD800 is about the only small wide angle lens with a view finder. The SD870 that Doug mentioned is essentially the same camera with a bigger LCD and no view finder. I do like the FX500 (although I prefer a view finder) and the Fuji F100fd (no view finder and more expensive) as well.

 

[arghman]

I ended up purchasing the Panasonic FX35. I'm pretty happy with it; pluses are wide-angle lens on a compact camera w/ easy-to-use interface, and "extended zoom" (if you use reduced #s of megapixels, it can have higher optical zoom by using the pixels at the center of the array) + choice of aspect ratios (4:3, 3:2, 16:9). Only real minus is lack of manual F-stop or exposure control. I can't see why they couldn't have allowed such a setting.

I don't find lack of a viewfinder a big deal for this camera.

I now have a tag-team approach (the FX35 for wide-angle landscapes set usually at 16:9, my FZ20 w/ macro lens for plant pictures) that worked pretty well for my vacation.