best wide angle compact under 35mm i.e 28mm?

Question

would love it if it had sd card or run on aa batteries too mostly for pictures of rooms and objects indoors without the use of flash photography

Answer 1

You have several options:

-- Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2
-- Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01
-- Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1

-- Canon PowerShot SD800 IS
-- Canon PowerShot S80

-- Olympus FE-200

-- Ricoh Caplio R5

Panasonic will soon be releasing these:
-- Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2 & DMC-TZ3
-- Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX30

Slightly older, you have these
-- Olympus C-7070 Wide Zoom
-- Samsung Digimax A55W
-- Fujifilm FinePix E510 Zoom

If you're willing to consider an SLR-like form factor, several more models models that go down to 28mm. But I assume by "compact camera" you are not considering an slr-like shape.

And a little less compact, but opening some options, you could go with a camera that doesn't natively go down to 28mm but can accept a wide-angle converter to bring it down. For example, the Canon A640 and G7 can accept a 0.75X Wide-angle converter, bringing it down to just under 27mm. Depending on which brand teleconverter you go with, you can have really excellent results with one of those. But good wide-angle converters are very large, relatively speaking.

Answer 2

No such camera. The Canon SD800IS (does not use aa batteries) has a 28mm lens and IS (image stabilization) so in lower light, if you use higher ISO settings, you may be able to take a picture without flash. Be careful of noise though with the higher ISO's. The best camera for indoor without flash (great processor/chips, little or no noise at higher ISOs) is the Fuju F30, F31 or the newest F40FD. But their widest angle is a not so wide 36mm. There large, brand new FinePix IS-1 goes to 28mm but I haven't heard anything about its noise/high iso levels.