[Delta Wave]

Thanks for the input and additional information. I have narrowed to the Canon G12 and Olympus XZ-1, the SX40 HS is simply to big and heavy for my purposes.  Regarding GPS comments - it's not a yuppy thing but a practical one for me.  I will likely be traveling to multiple locations and simply need to be able to distinguish pictures of one place/property from another, so it's a pretty important feature for me

NB

No insult intended, my humor tends to be a bit dry. 

[Mass. Wine Guy]

I was looking for something similar and bought a used Powershot S90 from eBay for $200 or so. It's basically everything the S95 or S100 are, minus a bell and whistle here and there. The S90 gets wonderful reviews, it has a fast f2.0 lens (at least at wide angle) is made of very solid feeling metal, and take extremely high quality images. It also shoots in RAW mode.