Canon and Panasonic are definitely consistantly the tops in the compact game. They both have their own quirks though. With Panasonics, unless you go with a budget hardly and zoom one (and why would you), you only get intelligent auto unless you go with the LX3 (which basically has no zoom power at all so it's not a great choice for someone wanting only one camera) - intelligent auto lets you set maximum values but it certainly is not full manual control. With Canon I believe all the high zoom SX cameras have manual control, as well as the premo S90 and G series, beyond that I think nothing else has anything more than program mode. Anyways, manual control might not be a big deal to you.
Other things are that Canons tend to process the pictures more, like the contrast curves are higher so the lights and darks can tend to be clippy and Canons always seem to have lots of in camera sharpening. Panasonic is less agressive on processing and noise reduction (ie. more noise in the end jpgs at higher ISO speeds, but with that more detail is kept versus Canon's smudgy as hell but relatively noise free images). And some canons won't optically zoom during video recording (uber lame) but they stopped doing that and have optical zoom available again during video on newer models. And Panasonic's lenses are wider angle than everyone else's but Canon gets more on the long end. Also Panasonic does a neat trick with making the sensor actually larger than the image circle so that you can change your aspect ratio (4:3, 3:2, 16:9) and keep the same angle of view and resolution by not using all the pixels of the sensor all the time.
So, anyways, I'd say you should look at a Panny ZS7/5 (or the ZR3 if you only want 8Xs instead of 12).
/rambling
Other things are that Canons tend to process the pictures more, like the contrast curves are higher so the lights and darks can tend to be clippy and Canons always seem to have lots of in camera sharpening. Panasonic is less agressive on processing and noise reduction (ie. more noise in the end jpgs at higher ISO speeds, but with that more detail is kept versus Canon's smudgy as hell but relatively noise free images). And some canons won't optically zoom during video recording (uber lame) but they stopped doing that and have optical zoom available again during video on newer models. And Panasonic's lenses are wider angle than everyone else's but Canon gets more on the long end. Also Panasonic does a neat trick with making the sensor actually larger than the image circle so that you can change your aspect ratio (4:3, 3:2, 16:9) and keep the same angle of view and resolution by not using all the pixels of the sensor all the time.
So, anyways, I'd say you should look at a Panny ZS7/5 (or the ZR3 if you only want 8Xs instead of 12).
/rambling
