I have solved my problem of having a portable player of digital photo's to be able to easily transport and share my photo's.
Yesterday I picked up my Creative Zen Vision W media player. It's a media player with 4.2" screen. It's a comfortable size to hold and pass around, excellent screen size and image quality (perfect image quality). I'm very happy with the result.
It came at a price - $479. If I knew someone in the US I could've bought one from Amazon and ended up with it for about $380 total including tax and currency conversion - so I feel ripped off just because I'm in Australia. But that's the only grudge I have
Online stores in Australia sell it for as little as $453 and as much as $768 (exactly the same item).
The player holds 30gig.
The only technical downside is that it doesn't support canon's RAW files. Considering my original goal did not include RAW's that's fine - I just wanted something to share processed images, so I'm happy to batch process them to JPG's.
Epson has a similar player that does support RAW but cheapest I could find was AU$899! Not worth it.