there must be oodles of comparos out there on digi cams. you should be able to find a range of similarly specced dcs analyzed by pros in any of a number of mags and sites. I do my buying here, so I read through a lot of japanese mags on the subject and the detail of the articles helps me narrow down my purchasing options. Have had good luck with Olympus for years though. Good skin renditions for one thing.
Yeti, if you want a small but decent one for your briefcase, I'd get the Minolta Dimage E500, 5 megapixels, 3x optical and 4x digital zoom, flash, 2" LCD screen. 79.99 at Costco. Beat that!