Toon Boom Studio or The Tab

I don't know a thing about the Tab, though it seems like I may have downloaded a demo at work. Never got to use it much-- they sorta expect me to teach when I'm there instead of doing my own thing.

I have been using Toon Boom since November of last year. I like it quite a bit in many ways. It is versatile, affordable, allows me to set up my own screen size and frame rate, does output to .swf or quicktime so I can use the same stuff for the web and for output to tape.

Although you can (and I do) use bitmap elements, it is primarily a vector based program. That means if you want to do your animation traditionally on paper (as i do) you have a couple of ways to get your drawings in. If you scan your roughs, you can use as stylus and the pencil tool to trace, getting nice clean lines as thick as you set them to be. I find it easier and faster to scan and import/vectorize the images. this tends not to be very nice to your pencil work until you work out a scanning system and import settings that work.

It does, in fact, have a camera, which you can peg and move around, and it can be set to be dynamic, which means you can change the lens settins or even zoom the camera rather than truck in (which I mostly use).

Finally, you can set up your 2D elements in what they call 3D space. It's sort of like setting up a bunch of paper dolls on top of a table and shooting them with your camera always pointed at a 90 degree angle to the picture plane. This can be helpful, but it takes some getting used to with more complex animations.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with Toon Boom, though if I had the bucks I'd be using Flipbook or maybe CTP by Crater (I'm giving it a trial right now).

Hope that helps.