I want to thank Michael for posting that wonderful review about the point and shoot Canon G9. I had an sd800 and wanted something better to carry around to events and everyday use. I am able to shoot in manual mode and adjust shutter speed, and ISO, wb etc. Got some great pictures with it and will use it when I am not shooting in the studio or at events where I need the slr.
If you are interested you can see my first round of shots (most on auto) at The Royal York last Thursday where I attended The Booklovers Ball with my wife who was one of the guests. Check out self portrait.
Link to a Lightroom gallery that I put up
http://www.maureenjennings.com/bookloversball/

I spent the last two days reading the manual and am now shooting comfortably in manual mode. I switched over to RAW this morning so it should be interesting to see how those files look once imported into lightroom.
Some shots from manual mode are here - http://www.idenford.blogspot.com

One thing I did notice for the shot I took of Beth Bruder holding up the copy of my wife's book on the blog link I mentioned in the previous post, was that I had the iso at 400, and shot the photo just using the window light and ambient tungsten in the room. It was quite noisy at iso 400. This was a raw file. I presume the noise issue is because of sensor size? I hardly get any noise on my 40D at iso 800.

Check this discussion thread for info and approaches to G9 noise reduction:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=20662

thanks for this