I'm looking for a compact, simple P & S for my wife, who isn't a techie. Image quality is not the issue and it doesn't need 12 MP - these will be just casual and travel photos to share with friends. What we want is simplicity - the fewer features, capabilities and 'modes' the better.
About the only useful feature might be optical zoom (and not some cr@p fake digital 'zoom' ). And I want it to show up on USB as a drive - with no crummy dedicated software needed just to get the pictures downloaded.
Simplicity, ease of use, are 90% of the decision. The other 10% would be quality, which is hard to predict. If it can take nice low-light pictures on its own, because its firmware is incredibly smart, that's great. If getting nice low-light pictures is possible only by tweaking a set of options via menu settings, forget it.
Any doofus product manager can cram 'features' into a device until it becomes a nightmare. It takes good engineering and design to make something truly simple and easy to use.
So I come to the highly knowledgeable people on this forum, to ask for their experiences.