I never got the sense that QVR-51 made anyone really impressed, at
least not as much as the S500 & the W1 when describing the image
quality and shooting performance.


People have their biases and historically Canon and Sony had quite impressive
marketing. I wouldn't expect those reviewers to be as excited about a casio as
they would be about a canon, and that bias could affect their evaluation.
Remember that those are individuals.

Here's something I find more more reliable

http://dima.pmai.org/pdf/2004_camera_winners.pdf

Note that the Casio is there... Note that the highly reputed Olympus 5060 and
8080 are there too, so is the Leica digilux 2.

Read carefully what it said. It's a result of voting by a panel of expert
judges that included "some of the most well-respected names in he industry". I
have the understanding that those tests were done "blindly" (they voted on the
images without knowing what cameras produced them) hence the entry number of
each camera was mentioned after its name in the press release. Certainly if i
was doing such a test I would make it a "blind" test to avoid any biases.