Decided to go with the HX230 with a 32gb class 10 card and trying 3 different brands of generic batteries for like $16 total. Thanks for the help.
You already bought it, but with minor price differences there’s no reason not to get Class 10 cards right now, but Class 6 would be fine for your needs.
Generic batteries are a bit of a hit and miss. I’ve had some good ones but a few that wouldn’t hold a charge for long.
For anyone who happens to be interested, this $50 32gb SDHC card seems to be pretty good. Ran it through a chkflsh test and it comes up 22MB/s read and 19.7MB/s write, which is well beyond the class 10 specs and better than the other SD cards in that price range.
Can’t say anything about its long-term reliability but it passes the initial tests now.
Got the SX230. Looks good. A bit smaller than I expected - pretty much all of them are. When I first handled a 300 HS I was amazed, it’s tiny. The SX230 is beefier but suitable for a shirt pocket. I’m used to bigger cameras with more grip, but the ergonomics seem good for its slim form factor. It feels really solidly built, all metal. No performance tests yet, battery is still charging… I’ll post later.
Really good daylight performance so far. Low light performance is decent - auto mode wants to crank it up to 1600 iso very quickly rather than use a slower shutter speed. I guess that’s a good tradeoff for most people who’d use auto. Image stabilization is good, so going manual and slowing down the shutter and reducing iso works decently. Not a great low light camera, but pretty decent so far.
I went to they valley of fire and took some pics and put them on my flickr if you want to see how the camera performs. Flickr free accounts are limited to 1024x768 so I’ll post some full res pics somewhere else later.