During the ’70s, a producer/director friend of mine used to roam the LA punk scene with an amazing little 35mm camera, the Minox 35 GL. It was the smallest 35mm camera ever produced. Its sharp Minotar lens shot beautiful pictures and thanks to the high ISO films that were being perfected in those days, one could shoot in very low light. There has never been any digital equivalent in size and low light capabilities until now, with Canon’s introduction of the S90. With the G11 and S90 cameras, Canon has finally reversed the maddening pixel race. Pixel density on the G11 has been reduced from its predecessor’s 34MP/cm² down to 23MP/cm² and low light performance has greatly improved. The S90 uses the same sensor and its f-2 maximum aperture helps to make this the best p&s for available light shooting.

The Canon S90 is slightly larger than Canon’s Elph (3.5 x 2.2 x 0.8″ for the Canon SD940IS vs. 3.9 x 2.3 x 1.2″ for the Canon S90), but it still easily slips into the average pocket. A bit too slippery sometimes and it almost fell out of my hands before I made it a rule to use the wrist strap. Much has been made of the programmable function control ring around the lens and it is indeed wonderful…

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Hit the jump to read the rest of Carel's review and to view his large gallery of sample shots]

[UPDATED]

Most of the time I shoot in Aperture Priority mode and have the lens ring set to exposure compensation. There is dial to the right of the LCD screen which gets assigned different functions, depending on what the shooting function mode and the lens ring are set to. The settings to avoid are ISO and Exposure Compensation, because it is very easy to accidentally move the dial. This is a nasty design flaw. I hope that a future firmware update will make the dial-function user-assignable. The zoom control around the shutter release button is just as hard to use as on most point & shoots, so another great use for the lens ring is as zoom control with a standard focal length for each click. The placement of the pop-up flash is awkward, at a spot where you want to place a finger to steady the camera. A more personal gripe is the lack of a viewfinder. The LCD screen forces you to hold the camera some distance away from your body and that makes it hard to hold steady at slow shutter speeds. Autofocus is snappy and accurate. Manual focus is a bit harder. The resolution of the LCD is just not high enough for an accurate reading. The manual advises to “turn the dial while looking at the magnified display to adjust the focus” and “hold the shutter halfway down to fine tune the focus”. Good luck with that! It is a bit easier to assign focus to the lens ring. The “slipperiness” of the camera body makes it a bit hard to hold the S90 with one hand. There is a small protrusion on the back of the camera under the shooting mode dial that helps. I have to figure out how to make this thumb-hold a bit less slippery, maybe with some rubber compound. For spherical panorama I almost always bracket a minimum of three exposures, 2 stops apart, to increase the dynamic range with HDR or with the open source project Enfuse, which “fuses” the best exposed pixels of each exposure bracketed image into one image. With some of these programs one can also align hand held shots, as long as there is not too much movement. Naturally I had to try this with the S90, but it is simply too slow when shooting multiple brackets, resulting in too much camera movement and movement within the scene. The S90 is great for macro shooting and gets as close as 2 inches. This, together with its fast and accurate focus, makes it very inviting to shoot macro snapshots. The LCD screen has a wide viewing angle which makes it possible to shoot overhead or low to the ground. I am also very grateful for the fast f2 lens. This, together with the improved noise characteristics of the sensor, gives about two stops more in low light conditions.

One of the major attractions of this little camera is that it shoots in raw mode. This allows one to squeeze more out of the image than the jpgs that are produced in camera. The camera sharpens the jpgs rather aggressively and this often causes halos. The sharpening can be lowered when shooting in C mode: In the “My Colors” menu, pick Custom Color option (where sharpen is hidden) and then reduce sharpen. There are a few sharpening plugins for Photoshop that are much better at avoiding halos. The light meters on all Canon point and shoots I have used have a tendency to not give enough weight to the highlights, so that one easily ends up with blown out areas. Therefore I often under-expose the image a bit. There is no information to retrieve from blown out highlights, but it is usually possible to salvage enough detail from the shadows. This is where it really pays off to shoot in raw mode. When one converts to 16 bit tif, all information of the raw image is retained, giving you much more to work with in post.

Included are a few impromptu tests, comparing the S90 to the G10 and my old Canon 350D dslr camera. The raw images were converted in DPP with Luminance noise reduction, Chrominance noise reduction and sharpening all set to ZERO. I noticed that DPP was a bit inconsistent when applying noise reduction and therefore thought it better to disable it for this comparison. The S90 performs about one stop better than the G10 when looking at these images. When allowing DPP to apply noise reduction to both the G10 and S90 images it looked more like two stops difference in noise. This may be the result of some weird DPP behavior, but at the moment I do not have another raw converter that is updated for the S90. The test images with no noise reduction show quite a bit of chroma noise, which is not visible when noise reduction is applied. DPP does a very good job of eliminating chroma noise, so after luminance and chroma noise reduction one is only left with residual luminance noise. This is much easier to live with than the color splotches of chroma noise. The noise of the 350D, which has a much larger sensor, is stillabout 1 1/2 stop better than the S90.

All non-test images have been converted with standard DPP settings and apart from some straightening are otherwise mostly untouched.

Carel Struycken
www.sphericalpanoramas.com

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The main gallery is here, and we'll update this with a link to the post containing his comparison samples once they go up]

[UPDATED: Comparison Crops are here.]