Roll out the barrel
My cheapish Fujifilm J12 digital compact camera provides relatively sharp images under a variety of lighting conditions, and has a useful macro setting. The widest angle on the zoom is equivalent to approximately 35mm on a 35mm film frame, so moderate wide by my normal standards. As you can see above, not a straight line in the image! Barrel distortion of an obvious kind.
Zooming out to medium focal length (as shown by the little bar on the LCD while zooming) and walking backwards to keep the image scale about the same produces much more Cartesian lines.