After trying and failing to buy a replacement camera off eBay for well over a week, I turned to Craigslist in search of a faster means of achieving the same thing. Quite conveniently, I found someone living not far from me with an Olympus C-3000Z for sale - two memory cards, a carrying case, neck strap, infrared remote, and video cables included - for a meager $50. For comparison, the camera retailed for $799 back in 2000. After one e-mail and one phone call, I dropped buy just hours after seeing the ad and picked up the camera, no middlemen involved. Painless, eh?
For a camera that's eight years old, it's held up extremely well. The only signs that it's been used are fingerprints, which look like they should wipe off easily, and the smell of some exorbitant amount of aftershave.
In terms of features, the C-3000Z beats my D-520Z hands down. With a maximum resolution of 2048x1536 (compared to 1600x1200) and full manual control over aperture size and shutter speed, the camera's output generally looks several orders of magnitude better than that of the old camera. In particular, the white noise that tended to appear on the D-520Z is virtually eradicated on the C-3000Z, not to mention the automatic focus actually works more than half of the time. It lacks certain features such as manual zoom (I suppose an SLR would have been in order for this) and a burst mode, but makes up for both in the fact that, unlike the old camera, it actually works.
I do find it interesting that semipro and consumer cameras only caught up recently. There was a two-year gap between the C-3000Z (2000) and the D-520Z (2002), yet the differences between these two are immense.