I have just bought the Fujifilm finepix s5000 3.1 mega pixel. This camera is built like an SLR and allows you to take macro (close up) and has a 10x zoom. You can also buy extra lenses for it. Because its build like an SLR you can manually control everything like apeture, shutter speed, white balance, continuos shoot, manual focus, 4 types of auto focus, flash control and build in flash and plenty other exposure control. It cost me £299 from the Jessops sale and should have been around £400ish. Oh yeah it'll automatically do all of the above for you if your not up on your photography just yet and want to point and shoot.
I can get about A4 hi res print from my camera at 300dpi, but i need to lower the dpi for an A3 print but im sure you're not going to be doing alot of those.
The best place to check out cameras is
www.dpreview.com they pull all cameras to pieces on there. But sometimes I do think that they expect everyone to need a an 11 mega pixel £5k camera.