Basically Im wondering if anyone knows of a decent small compact camera that has a small lens and manual focus, for microscope photography. Its ironic that the best things to use are things like camera phones, as the lenses are so small that they get maximum output from the microscope eyepiece, whilst larger lenses like SLRs tend to get the circular cropping and things going on!

Annoyingly the corner placement of the lens on my Olympus tough cameras makes them about 5mm too "extreme" to fit properly using a digiscoping camera mount I have.

Basics is go very cheap, no zoom generally means fixed focus, and use the focusing on the device you are using.

I know of someone who modded one of these very cheap cameras, removed the rather grotty lens and replaced it with another one.

This might be of interest to you too, camera modded for infra red.

http://geektechnique.org/index.php?id=254