There are a lot of digicams in all manner of styles and price ranges. Most are pretty good with a few that exceptional and a few that are bringing up the rear. Hard to recommend 1 w/o knowing your experience, what you think you'd be doing with it (aside from lake photos) and how much you want to spend. In the tiny camera catagory I think Canon (SD400/450 now being replaced by SD500/550) has about the best if only because they retain an optical viewfinder. In a general purpose camera I'd agree w/Grant and go with Canon's A610/620, if only for the 4x optical zoom (3x is typical). In the so called "Super Zoom" catagory it gets much harder. I'd almost recommend Panasonic's FZ-5/20/30 but sometimes their noise reduction gets in the way of a good shot. If you're looking at a camera with the 35mm equivalent of a 300+mm lens then make sure it has some form of image stabilization. In addition to the sites RG mentioned you'll want to look at
www.dpreview.com . They have a good listing of all current cameras and highly detailed reviews of a lot of them.