Canon PowerShot S90 Digital Camera (10 Megapixel, 3.8 Optical Zoom) 3.0 inch LCD

Product Information

Manual focusing selects the centre of the screen for fine tuning. A proximity level sits to the right. Earthy colours such as brown and greens when photographing foliage or landscapes look pretty good. Green is realistic meaning your garden or trips to the park won't suffer and brown is rich and not to dark.

Construction: 11 elements in 9 groups 7 elements in 6 groups (2 double-sided aspherical elements including 1 UA element)

Low ISO in controlled light is exceptional and as the sensitivity moves through into the mid-range, slight salt and pepper noise is only detected at ISO400. Not bad for a small sensor, so the thoughts on finding the optimum resolution may be true after all. Noise is evident at ISO800 and ISO1600 and by the final stage of ISO3200, coloured blobs of green and purple are more noticeable. However, I expected it to be a lot more aggressive than this and I'm really happy with how the camera has controlled noise.

Here are two 100% crops which have been Saved as Web - Quality 50 in Photoshop. The right-hand image has had some sharpening applied in Photoshop. The out-of-the camera images are a little soft at the default sharpening setting. You can change the in-camera sharpening level if you don't like the default look. Sporting a relatively modest 3.8x optical zoom, the built-in lens is image stabilised, it has a bright aperture of f/2.0 and a wide-angle view of 28mm. At wide-angle there is a slight amount of barrel distortion which only shows on straight lines that run parallel with the edge of the frame. From the top then, we have a rounded piece of moulding extending from below where the mode dial sits on the top plate, a subtle indentation provided into which rests the tip of the users thumb when gripping the camera for shooting handheld. This is the only place on the camera affording much in the way of manually steadying the S90; as mentioned, keeping things resolutely compact, there's no grip provided at the front or sides - being one of the few areas in which this model feels truly compromised. Perhaps more predictably, point-and-shoot user friendliness on the S90 comes in the form of the fully automatic face detection, motion detection and Smart Auto scene detection technologies regularly found on Canon's snapshot compacts. Less predictable - and disappointingly so - is that video clips are of bog standard 640x480 pixels resolution rather than the increasingly ubiquitous 1280x720 or 1920x1080: the fabled Full HD. Had Canon included this nigh ubiquitous functionality the little S90 might have had it all - on paper at least. The S90 is noticeably smaller (and crucially, a lot slimmer) than the Panasonic LX3 - and a lot lighter too.The Canon Powershot S90's maximum shutter speed is 15 seconds, which is great news if you're seriously interested in night photography. The shot below was taken using a shutter speed of 1/20th second at ISO 800. I've included a 100% crop of the image to show what the quality is like. The S90 is almost unique among recent compact cameras in that it doesn’t have HD video recording. The video mode is limited to 640 x 480 resolution at 30fps, with mono audio recorded via an internal microphone. The optical zoom cannot be used while recording, but there is a smooth digital zoom available. The video and sound quality aren’t that brilliant by recent standards, but at least it can record clips up to an hour long. A similar category to high-end compact cameras are mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras ("micros"), some of which are in a compact form factor (with a similar-sized body), such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1, Olympus PEN E-P1/ E-P2, and Sony Alpha NEX-3. Micros differ however in being significantly larger (with lens attached), and significantly higher-end, featuring much larger sensors and interchangeable lenses. The Canon boasts standard focusing, an ok macro function that can focus in as close as 5cm and manual focusing. This mode will pop up a window in the middle of the monitor that shows an enlarged version of the centre of the frame.