I think the idea of a surveillance camera powered by the sun is not a bad one, but I would like to see the cell connected to a deep cycle battery so that after the sun goes down it could still function. Say if one had one posted at the foot of the driveway leading up to your illicit late night Old Maid/cricket fighting gamepit. Maybe an infrared spotlight too off of the same power source, for illumination, and a camouflage blind over the whole thing too.
My HP Photosmart 735 has pointed and shot its last today, after one ultimate electronics-rattling spill after three years of same, and it was clear to me that I needed to pick up a replacement digital camera for work. It's all part of that wave of stuff breaking down recently, I think.
The main things I wanted were a macro mode for taking close-up pictures of repairs, SD card compatibility, a good size display for previewing pictures. I didn't care about having lots of pixels, since I spend most of my time taking pictures at the lowest resolution anyway, and since I haven't gotten into shooting video or recording audio clips, I didn't care about any of those other multimedia functions. Above all, I wanted something which was rugged, since I carry it into the field every day in my camera bag and don't want to have to worry about the hard knocks it will take now and then. Oh, and I didn't want to spend more than $200 US.
Of course, there really is no such camera out there, as far as I can tell. On that next-to-last qualification, I am wondering why they don't make leather cases (not bags) that protect the corners and backs of the camera while still making it possible to take a shot just by unsnapping a couple of snaps, the way the old SLR cases used to be. I still have my old Nikon film camera from twenty years ago and more, and the body without a scratch because of its case, and it seems like some company like Rhinoskin should be impossible to do the same thing for the low-end digital cameras too. Or maybe one of those companies that make nose bras.
At the office supplies store nearest to my house I picked up a Kodak camera with twice as many pixels as I strictly need. It even fit under the last of my criteria, and they threw in a 512MB SD card as part of the deal. I can store 3437 pictures at the lowest resolution setting without changing out the card, which would probably take me years. I'm still getting used to the different auto-focus behavior of this camera. You can check out a picture of myself I took to try it out. 
