Lol yea well you think I would when she stays at home all day taking care of the baby and the house. She deserves it.
My mom got the same model and it works quite well, especially in low light settings. Cannon's subtly different from Nikon... it's complicated, at least in my limited experience. Glad she likes it!
Canon Powershot SX20/30 IS GREAT bridge cameras, but not brilliant indoors or for capturing the sky well on full auto. However, both have a twistable screen, and best of all in full manual mode when you change the shutter speed the camera predicts (out of the 100+ times i've used it it has not been incorrect once) how the final image will look. I got the SX20 IS for my bar-mitzvah for £450. Recommended.
My parents are both wedding photographers. Canon is overall the better camera, especially the Canon Mark 5D series. Nikon produces a higher-quality photo at a higher aperture though. It's all personal preference.
Canon all the way for me!... I'm still using the Canon T2i but, pretty soon I'm about to drop the money and get me a true professional grade camera. Canon 7D! Been reading tons of reviews on it and thinking about it a lot since it more like the daddy to my camera but, those 8 FPS sounds amazing in my eyes.
I'm an uber-perfectionist. Assuming there are shots that need to connect to each other (like maybe a side shot of a character opening a medicine cabinet, then a shot from the POV of the cabinet) I'd be too anal about them perfectly flowing into each other to get it done with a single camera. Plus I'm working with a story that deals with time-travel for my first short, and I plan on submitting it to festivals, so it needs to be polished (and will really open up possibilities if I have two). I currently have a prosumer Canon videocamera (well it's my stepdad's), a flipHD (also his) and a sony hd camcorder from a few years ago, but I need the video to be consistent.