You don't have to break the bank to get a good quality camera today. Prices are much lower than they used to be. I got my 1st digital cameras probably about 15 years ago. They were cheapies with only 1 or 2 megapixels and the pictures were not that good. About 10 years ago I decided to get something better and bought a Fuji A340 with 4 MP. At that time, 4 MP was pretty good, not the best, but good. It took wonderful pictures and has served me faithfully all these years. Most of the pics you see me post here were taken with that camera. Even with only 4 MP, I needed to turn the settings down a notch or so because the pictures were huge and actually too sharp and grainy. They also filled the memory card quite quickly, not allowing many to be taken.
Well, after all these years, the battery pack on the A340 is fading, not holding a charge for very long. I plan to replace it (only about $10) but thought I'd see what's new. Since this Fuji has been so good to me, I looked at some of their current offerings. I was able to score a new JX680 with 16 MP for $57. Seeing that the A340 set me back like $180, this is quite an improvement in quality and price. Once again, I needed to turn the settings down, this time several notches, to get smaller pictures and adequate storage on the camera.
Even though the settings are turned down on both these cameras, the pics are still quite large and very good quality. In fact, most that I post are cropped out portions of them. You need a good pic to start with if you're going to be cropping a small area out of it. That brings us to the photo editing part of the story. The big main stream programs like Adobe Photo Shop are huge and difficult to use. Sure, they'll do most anything with a picture but like I said, they're complicated. For what I do most, simple cropping and re-sizing, I found a nice little free program, Fly Free Photo Editing.
http://www.5dfly.com/free-photo-editing-software/