thanks for all of the advice, I can see hope on the horizon, but believe that digital is not quite there for my purposes. The G3 seems to be a very good update and maybe the shutter lag that does not dog the Leica as much, would have been solved. The TTL flash system for macro work is really quite astounding. The Leica is reported to have a lot of noise at the 400 ISO setting, but may be firmware upgraded at some point. Both may not have the wide-angle, but they do have an aperture that starts at f2. Everything is basically very close to my ideal specification, e.g. fast aperture, good megapixel rating, compact, wide angle to short telephoto lenses, just everything is spread over the current range of cameras, but give it a year, and a 28-100 f1.8-2.4, 4-5 megapixel, compact with the leicas 2.5 inch screen in a solid metal body must surely arrive. So I've looked at digital scanners only to find that they've gone an raised the bar even higher, the 4000 dpi scaaners pull a filesize equivalent to about 80 megabytes, almost 6000x4700 pixels large, and though it could be justifiably argued that this size exceeds film resolution for all but the sharpest films, it does mean that the image could be cropped. Oh well, looks like I need an 11 megapixels compact now. Many thanks to everyone that replied both on and off the list. nod.
