UPDATE
Thank you to all who visited and commented,
from everyone's responses i have figured out a few things - the first is,
that with minor compensation i can get the g10 to produce this:

there were 2 problems with my previous test:
the first was that the EV setting on my s70 was at -2/3 while i thought it was at 0 (egg on face; thank you hihihi for noticing this)
the second was, that when trying to duplicate the tests, i realized that i must not have metered in the shadow area when i took the s70 shot. i thought that i had, but the screen is extremely hard to see in bright light (much, much improved in the g10) so it seems not to have been the case.
from everyone's comments, i now understand that i will probably need to keep the camera at an EV of -1/3 or -2/3 under most circumstances. the brilliant thing about the g10 is that while you can adjust this through the menu system, there is actually an override dial on the top of the camera, very nice
i also understand that bright sun can blow out the high end out of g10 images and i am concerned about the ramifications of this when dealing with (sometimes unavoidable) glare when photographing artwork...

and then i still have a bit of an issue with the size:
both physical: i have come to understand that if a camera comes with a neck strap, i will consider it "big", while those packaged with a wrist strap i deem "small" (guess what the g10 comes with)
and digitally: in all this testing, i have yet to see any compelling evidence that the 15mg file size is necessary for the results i want.

 

 

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this is the problem at it's worst: bright sun/deep shade
on the left is what i am used to seeing (from my S70)
on the right is what my G10 sees

cameras were both in P mode with all settings determined by the camera, no overrides
while i usually shoot raw, test were done at highest quality jpg
the G10 had the exposure metering set to evaluative (not spot)
icontrast was not on

images were resized but not altered in any other way
as you can see
no amount of processing is going to get color back into those blown out areas
(well, no reasonable amount)

basically i am wondering if the metering in this particular camera is malfunctioning
or
if the G10 simply can't handle extreme light situations as well as the S70...

in even light, performance is comparable
(only in real telephoto situations does the G10 outperform the S70)
i simply don't see 14 megapixels and double the file size worth of value in what i've shot so far!!!

and surprisingly i don't see a difference in the barrel distortion when shooting 2D artwork
:(
i was hoping (from what i read) to see improvement there

any comments/ideas would be helpful
if you don't like blogspot commenting system you can twitter @_randomthoughts
or
email me: theartproject dot net at gmail dot com

thanks

3.21.2009