In this paper we consider transmit and receive selection methods designed to achieve high channel capacities in a single-user MIMO link. A variety of radio channels are considered, including i.i.d. Rayleigh, correlated Rayleigh and Ricean fading environments. Also considered is the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI) and a simplified waterfilling scheme. In all cases, we evaluate the performance of optimal selection, simple norm-based selection and other benchmark selection techniques. The major contribution is a general approach to analyzing the capacity of the norm-based selection schemes via a simple power scaling factor. We are able to assess the impact of different channels, imperfect CSI and power allocation using this power scaling factor. Furthermore, the analysis is valid for all scenarios: transmit selection, receive selection and joint transmit-receive selection. Results are shown which compare the capacity performance over a wide range of cases. A notable conclusion is that optimal selection, which is computationally intensive, is outperformed at low signal-to-noiseratios by the simple norm-based approach with power allocation.