Go with Canon SX 110 IS. The ultra 10x zoom you will get is really good & you will surely miss it in Sony. 9MP is good enough to enlarge the photos. I own the Canon SX 100 IS, the predecessor to SX 110 IS which is same to SX 110 IS but has 8 MP with 10x optical zoom as opposed to 9MP with 10x on SX 110IS. I even wrote a exhaustive review on the camera, which you can read
here before making the decision.
Tripods start from measly Rs.500 and go all the way up in thousands. Offcourse the cheap one's are not sturdy & the material used is also of poor quality. Tripods are mostly useful when taking night shots at higher focal lengths and high shutter speeds.
Agree on some points though with tripods you can get ultra sharp images. Optical Image Stabilizer does helps but try taking pics at night at high shutter speeds. Let's see how well you can manage