An overlooked brand is the Panasonic. I have the FZ-30, but they do have smaller P+S cameras that are mostly well recommended. One additional benefit to the Panasonic cameras is the Optical Image Stabilization for those who usually get blurry photos.
Also, quite a few of their cameras have more than 3x optical zoom(Up to 10x in some cameras) which negates having to do much cropping after the fact as you can bring your subject closer to you.