I'm working on a small digitisation project with a local volunteer-run museum in the SE and we now need a good basic digital camera to begin our digitisation activity. Most of the object capture work will be done by the volunteers, so we need to acquire a camera capable of making images and saving them as RAW files rather than just .jpgs.

I don't usually work with budget-end cameras so I'm not familiar with models that might fit the bill - can anyone on the list offer some hints about devices we can buy that might work well at our level? We're looking to spend £300-£500?