[UPDATED: Now better laid out for comparisons]

As mentioned in the review, all images were shot without noise reduction or sharpening. For the Canon 350D I only shot 400, 800 and 1600ISO

-Carel Struycken

PowerShot S90 Crops:

ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1600	ISO 3200

PowerShot G10 Crops:

ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1600

EOS 350D Crops:

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600

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.]

Most people who get a hold of this camera will probably first try the projector. I happened to be in a room with lots of daylight bouncing off white walls, but could still get a decent projection of about 13″ diagonal on a shadowy section the wall. In a room with dimmed light one can easily increase the projection size to a 30″ diagonal. The projected image is not as crisp as the same image viewed on an LCD screen or as print, but this will not be much of a detriment for the average action snapshot or video.

The 5x zoom lens (28-140mm equivalent) also does macro to an amazing 3cm (1.2″) and with the advertized 5 “advanced Nikon image stabilization features” one uses the full range without giving it much thought. As with many P&Ss, the zoom control tends to overshoot from wide angle to full tele and it takes practice and finesse to make it end up somewhere in the middle range.

The “intelligent automated shooting modes” select the best combination of apperture, ISO and shutter speed on the fly and it seemed to make the right decision in all environments where I tried it out.

The camera also has a “Smart portrait system with skin softening” which I neglected to test. The camera detects faces very rapidly and  the skin softening should be a welcome piece of automation to all of us who have done portrait retouching. There is also a “smile timer”, “blink proof function” and the camera fixes red-eye in-camera. Pretty much every kind of retouching is now done in the camera. Who knows, maybe we will have “auto slimming” in a few years, where everybody is electronically slimmed down to an ideal Body Mass Index.

But, most importantly, this little camera gave very good results and also produced surprisingly low noise at higher ISO settings. This has always been a challenge for P&Ss with their tiny sensors and densely packed pixels, but during the last year the pixel race has finally slowed down and the attention to more important characteristics such as noise and dynamic range is beginning to produce results.

I practically always carry a Canon Elph along, but packing my Canon 5D DSLR requires a mission statement, especially when it involves a back country hike. When most brands figured out how to provide a “live view” on the camera’s LCD screen last year, the bulky penta prism and noisily clapping mirror box felt even more like a puzzling anachronism. Why not get rid of all that bulk and do the framing and focusing on the LCD screen? Olympus, with its decades old tradition of delivering exceptional quality in the smallest possible camera body now presents the first camera that follows through on this idea. Although the camera is not easily “pocketable”, it is small and light enough to toss in a daypack and with the wide-angle “pancake” lens, will even fit in the front pocket of a pair of roomy trousers.

The micro four/thirds sensor format, which is currently supported by Panasonic, Olympus and Leica, is smaller than the more popular APS sensor format, but in its most recent incarnation, noise level is not noticeably worse than on the current batch of APS sensors. Olympus, Leica/Panasonic and Sigma also have a very complete list of excellent lenses and most of these are significantly smaller and lighter than their equivalent for the larger sensor reflex cameras.

Handling the camera.
Even with my very large hands, the body felt easy to handle. I usually kept my left hand on the lens, tweaking the zoom or manual focus and providing some stability for the right hand, while it was dealing with the abundance of settings to choose from. The grouping of the functions is not as intuitive as for instance on the Canon G10 and I had to keep leafing through the manual to figure things out. Practically every function can be set using three different interfaces and the second (vertical) knob also helps to eventually work out a personalized routine to master the myriad of settings. Manual focus worked well on the LCD, provided there was no light shining on the screen. Shooting outdoors with only the LCD screen as “viewfinder” was a challenge. Maybe a wide rimmed straw hat would help to keep the screen sufficiently shaded, but a built-in optical viewfinder would really help. There is a separate viewfinder that fits on the hot shoe, but this takes away from the streamlined compactness of the camera body is not of much help when using the zoom lens.

The E-P1 and its soon to appear Panasonic cousins are defining a new and exciting niche and I am looking forward to carrying one of these in my daypack.

Included are some sample shots, straight out of the camera. My bison shots came out a bit blurrier than I had expected. They were shot in a hurry through a car window, so either I or the bison must have moved a bit too much. This was my first experience with a HD video capable still camera and I would like to delve some more into this subject in the near future.