Recommend me a good compact digital camera

[pigsinmud]

I have a digital slr camera which I love, however, there are times when it is too much to carry. Take Saturday, lovely day out, but hot. Already had a bag with sun cream, water, hats, sunglasses (have 4 children so quite a lot of stuff). Then I had my camera in it's own bag with spare lens and it was too much! I ended up leaving it in the car. I would have loved to have been snapping pictures all day. It was ok when we had a pushchair as I could dump it in that, but those days have gone.

So any recommendations welcome - for those cameras which are really good, not just ok. I am fussy about the quality of my photos!

Sorry no recommendations
but bumping thread for you as I was about to start a thread about this.
I am in similar situation and on the look out for a new camera as well.

My wedding photographer recommended the canon g12 to me and it's awesome, smaller than a dslr but a little bigger than a standard digital but does everything that a dslr can do.

I have this which I'm very happy with. Found that all of the other good compacts I looked at were not really substantially smaller or less heavy than my slr except the LX3. It's light enough to carry every day.

Thank you. I will have a look at those two.