This is a request to my dear readers. I'm currently looking for a replacement for my Canon Ixus 40 camera. I've never been very happy with its image quality, and lately the lens is doing scary mechanical noise like some missing teeth on gears, and it seems to be loosing sensitivity, pushing the ISO to higher values, thus increasing the image noise.
So I'm looking at the current compact cameras, and nothing really stands out of the crowd. Manufacturers have been pushing resolution to incredible values (up to 12 Mpix) for small sensors, leading to quite noisy pictures when you go past 200 or 400 ISO.
So far I'm leaning towards the Panasonic Lumix TZ3 (reviews here), which has a reasonable 7 Mpix resolution, seems to have decent image quality and an amazing Leica 10x stabilized zoom lens. Definitely not as compact as the Ixus 40, but the additional size for the 10x zoom seems to be worth it.
So, dear readers, do any of you have some advice about a compact camera? What I'm looking for is primarily good image quality even in low light conditions, and a stabilized lens. A zoom better than x3 is a nice plus, but not that important.
Oh, and don't tell me I should get a DSLR. I have a Nikon D40x, and the compact camera is for situations where carrying the DSLR is not convenient.