Shortly I plan on buying either a Canon S5 or a Panasonic FZ8.

Image quality is my number 1 criteria.  I will forsake the other features like the better EVF and composition grid on the FZ8 or Facial recognition focus and the swivel LCD on the Canon and movies are not a priority.

One of my main concerns with the Pan is NOISE.  The Venus processor blurs the detail to get rid of the noise so that is no good.  Every review that I have ever read on this camera pointed out noise as a killer issue even though the remainder of the review was favorable.

I would like to hear from user of the FZ8 who:

Do heavy cropping and print 8.5x11.

How bad is the noise?  Do you find it disturbing?

If you use raw mode can you reduce it without degrading the photo and if so how much work is involved.