Well, I got a box together and did some test. I'm much happier with the results this time around and am pretty sure I'm going to go forward with my plans to build something more durable this weekend.
Here are the results of my test, the only change made was some resizing to match the size with various camera. It's still fairly high resolution, so you might want to download it then look at some outside program. I also tried to be as consistent as possible.
Here's the link. (1.3mb... sorry Idol)
You might also notice that I have three cameras again... it's a sad story involving much weakness on my part. After I stupidly broke and returned my first Canon A630 I always missed it. The Canon S3 has served me well and did awesome stuff while in Thailand (I should probably upload some pictures... huh?), I could never quite get the macro quality out of it that I felt the like A630 gave me. Well, a couple of weeks ago the screen on Aimee's camera broke while traveling and we went shopping to replace it this weekend. After my experience with Best Buy and past experiences Aimee had with Ritz/Wolfe camera, she decided that was going to be the place to buy the camera from. While we were there I noticed they still had the A630 in stock, on clearance. I managed to hold off, but that didn't last. Aimee had to order the camera she wanted (a Canon SD850is) and it came in today. I went to pick it up today and while in the process I was talking to the sells person about my experiences with the two cameras. It turned out that they didn't expect to get another A630 in stock ever again and she really didn't know what was going to give it a direct replacement in the lineup and neither of us had seen an news of it actually getting a direct successor. So, I caved and walked out the door with it.
Looking at the results of my test, I'm happy I did and it's good to see that it wasn't just my imagination that the S3 was taking noisier macro shots with slightly less true colors.