Macro is for close-ups, zoom is for bringing distant things closer. Although the UZ superzoom series from Olympus is one that I'd say is pretty good for the price. I'm not sure of the macro and close focusing capabilities. You want something that can focus close. A Canon G11 is almost a DSLR and will focus down to 1 cm, takes excellent quality images because it has a larger sensor. $500 but a fantastic camera. 5X optical zoom.

You can ignore anything about digital zoom,which is the same as cropping and enlarging. It's irrelevant.

The question is how much do you want to spend? You are in the $300 to $500 (and up) range for a good camera. Small pocket camera for less, just make sure it does close-ups. How big? How big do you want to make the prints? There are all kinds of things that come into what you think your needs will be beyond chips and room keys.

Lighting chips and room keys starts to make the apparently simple, more complex. Reflections, flat plane matching the sensor or you get distortion, you take a photo then have to edit and crop, where the scanner produces a shorter path to having something usable. You will actually be reducing the size of the pictures or scans for the web! For example, a computer monitor is roughly 1,600 x 1,200 pixels (now we have CRT and LCD and all kinds of size, but in general) that's 2 megapixels at full size. Do you want your scans to fill a whole computer screen?

An 8 megapixel camera will print an 8 x 10 photo at 300 dpi, which is much more than you need. If shooting 4x6 for family photos, you only need a 3 MP camera! An 8 megapixel image is about 3264 pixels wide. That's twice the size of the average monitor or laptop screen.

Example, this chip is a photo taken with a pocket camera. Edited with Photoshop. Two things, it's distorted because it's not scanned, it's only 640 x 480, not some mega huge image.

Don't be fooled by the Megapixel wars. You can get a nice used 6 or 8MP camera and make great chip photos also will print nice vacation photos. They are packing 12MP on the same size sensor, which means, a bigger number for marketing and not much for what you can actually do, maybe makes the images worse in some cases because of noise in the shadows... but!

Finally, you can get a Epson scanner for under $100 that will make much better images of chips and room keys and then get a good pocket camera, $200 - $300 for vacations and have the best of both. My vote is get a scanner.

Any Canon Powershot should do macro and take pictures of chips or room keys and nice personal photos. Take your pic based on color or name.