It doesn't make sense to buy a camera these days that doesn't shoot both still photographs and video. Realize that the audio from your camera will not be very good. Record audio separately with a digital recorder and sync that audio track with your video using DualEyes. Get a good quality digital recorder with a Redhead Windscreen. Be sure to view the demo videos at Redhead. I currently recommend the Zoom H1 for the most bang for the buck. It will be about $100. You should acquire the microphones that fit your work. Certainly a small clip-on mic is a necessity. A wireless mic is very handy but much more expensive. If you already have an iPhone, you can turn it into a pretty good recorder using an adapter that will allow using professional microphones with XLR cables. There are numerous recording apps available for the iPhone and some allow e-mailing the recording. This is an easy way to get the recording into your computer for editing. Get familiar with a video editing package such as Final Cut (Mac) or Premiere (both Mac and Windows). If you have a Mac, you already have iMovie. For preparing pictures for publication, I recommend Lightroom 3. It is cheaper than Photoshop and will do everything you need to do. For learning Lightroom, I recommend Scott Kelby's book. What about sound? Audacity is an open source sound editing program available for both Mac and Windows. You will also need the LAME MP3 encoder for Audacity. Soundslides is an easy-to-use program for make stories of still pictures with a synchronized sound track. Make your sound track first and prep your pictures for the web (instructions on the Soundslides website). Soundslides make a web-ready folder. FTP the folder to your web server and you know the actual URL. Using the actual URL, you can get the code to embed your story in another page on the site here. Use FileZilla (Mac or Windows) as an FTP program. What laptop should I buy? Get the MacBook Pro that you can afford. What if I already have a Windows laptop? I'm sorry. But don't let that stop you from doing multimedia. You can still do it.