All of you seems quite familiar with photography, and my opinions may not count right to agree to all of you guys. If I were to buy a camera right now, I will pick Canon S2 IS, though its a bit old model, otherwise I will wait 6 month or a year more to buy the next version of Canon G7. I am not a fan of Canon, but I admit it is the best one for still photography. The latest series of canon camera sensors offers variety of ISO equivalent ranging up to 3200, which you require to take awesome pictures in low intensity of light or capturing fast moving objects. Most of you guys have noticed that many of your choice camera does quite a good job in daylight but they frustrate you in indoor shoot. That is exactly where the canon offers you unbeatable advantage. The next big advantage of canon is its image stabilizer, that prevents blur in the photo due to your slight motion of hand when you press the shutter button. The third big advantage of canon is its multi point auto focus technique. The reason I prefer canon S2 IS is because of its very large optical zoom 12X (Max 48X if used with Digital zoom), decent funcionality, AA batteries and acceptable 5 MP resolution. You might think of getting higher resolution, but they eat up a lot of space that you really don't need all the time. Quite often you might need to resize the photographs loosing all your advantage to a much smaller size when you want them to upload on a web or emails. Canon G7 is one of the latest product, but this unit does not have all features that canon could have packed on it. So, there is speculation that Canon will soon upgrade this version after a brief while, perhaps they are testing a new marketing policy. People are expecting Canon to bring a new product that comes with all of G7 and S3 IS features in one unit. Sony, Casio Exilim and Fuji are good too to impress newbie. But they all lose the competition against Canon if all features are tested. I have once tested these 4 different cameras to take the picture of same location at the same time with same resolution settings. Then I compared these photographs zooming down to pixel level to test how well they were recording the colors of the object at their each pixels. My finding was that the Canon was able to record the largest number of pixels correct producing the best photo. Fuji was second best, and sony was the worst among four. Sony uses some sort of auto-intelligence algorithm, which actually does bad job. If you do not like canon then I recomment Casio Exilim as the second choice, because it has sleek design, longer battery life and easy to handle. Fuji, although better than Casio, I did not like it for its style, design and weights. You may think in another way. Hope, this information would help you guys to chose a good camera for you.