>I have been considering buying a digital camera - I haven't any experience with those yet. Two questions:
>
>1) What are the things to watch out for? Megapixels is one feature often toutet, but it would seem to me that, given that I plan to use send many pictures by e-mail and perhaps put a few on my Web site, 5 megapixels (for example) would be an overkill, since I will have to reduce the quality anyway. What other features would be relevant?

Resolution (megapixels) is not/should not be the most important issue. Quality, ease of use, battery life and more importantly type of memory used should be what to look for.

Cameras come in three types. Consumer, Prosumer and Professional. Look into the segment you are interested in. As you say, for email, or website posting, you do not want big size/big resolution. Bigger megapixel count looks better but produces bigger files, more memory/disk consumption, slower saving times, a problem if you are taking sports or bird photography, and heavier files (a problem if you want to email). Better prosumer and up cameras allow you to select the resolution used so you can change it on the fly from low to max. For example, my Nikon can go up to 8MP which in raw mode gets you between 8MB and 11MB per photo!



>2) I got an offer of BenQ camaras. Does anybody have any experience with this brand?

Never heard of them. For whatever camera you are looking for, check dpreview.com as the best independent review site.