I got my young daughter a cheap Olympus Stylus Tough 6000. It wins on cheapness (I paid $115, I believe) and on ruggedness, but the optics and sensor leave a lot to be desired. 
I'd rate the photo quality somewhere around "camera phone".

I don't know about recent Pentax models, but (although I love my Pentax DSLR!) Pentax's record with P&amp;S cameras has been lackluster. The one I used a few years ago was shockingly slow, and none to impressive with the results. Maybe newer models are better. If I cared about image quality, I think I'd spend a little more and get a Panasonic DMC-TS2.

Advice on an inexpensive but very hardy/tough point-and-shoot camera
I'm trying to run a Grails app inherited from another developer. It has just one domain class, which we'll call foopackage.DomainObject. When I compile it, a .class file turns up in target/classes just as I'd expect. However, when I try grails run-app, I get 

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error 
creating bean with name 'pluginManager' defined in ServletContext 
resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml]: Invocation of init method 
failed; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not 
initialize class foopackage.DomainObject


At first I thought this might be because DomainObject was trying to talk to a nonexistent database in a broken static initializer, so I reduced it down to just

package foopackage

class DomainObject {}


And I still get the same error. Maybe there's some underlying configuration/GORM problem, but it's not showing up with --stacktrace. Any hints?
