I can also highly recommend Canon for quality images as well as great customer service. Should the camera break for some reason within the first year they will repair it for free and do it in a very quick turn around and with Quality.
I started out with Canon Powershots and most recently bought the Powershot SD790 IS. It has many great functions and all images are great! My favorite setting is the Kids and animals setting which has a fast shutterspeed reducing blurry images. You can easily turn off flash in all settings and even in lower light achieve beautiful pictures. Check out sites like ecost and newegg for reasonable prices.
I tried out a nikon point & shoot recently, and while I liked the smile detector function I was very disappointed with the quality of images other than those taken in bright daylight. The camera would automatically adjust the ISO to a very high one, resulting all images to have a very strong graininess to them.
I returned the camera within a week.
Good luck!