panasonic makes relly good digital camera. and if i am not incorrect, it have this stuff that is call image stablization which reduce the amount of motion blur when you take a picture but you shake the camera. I believe its the optical image stablization which is much better than the digital image stablization because digital Image Stablization eats half of the pixels and double the flash stops which can be a bad thing while the optical doesn\'t but optical is more expensive...
if you want better picture, Canon is probably better at picture quality thanks to its len and CCD quality, and the build quality of the camera also seem compact but comfortable to me.
but i don\'t think canon make anything more than 5x optical zoom.
i think you made a good choice with panasonic camera. I doubt you will notice any difference between 4 or 5 megapixels due to it CCD and stuff. So go 4 megapixels if you can with like 7 opitcal zoom to save you some money.