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

Product Information

I'd have liked having Program shift as an option on the front Control ring, but that's handled by the rear Control dial, after you half-press the shutter, then the EV button, a convoluted process. If you prefer to shoot in Av mode where you can control the Aperture of the lens (I recommend this mode) then you can open up to F2 and get some pretty special image quality. It is the ultimate POINT AND SHOOT but not as feature rich as the S90 and its high ISO is not as good. Long a leader in digital cameras, Canon has been playing catch-up of late, moving swiftly to match other manufacturers' recent moves in the digital camera space.

The intelligent auto means you can leave it to the camera to sort out settings if you wish or it has a good variety of user settings for the more adventurous. To go with it, you can register up to five commonly used menu items to a My Menu tab in the main-menu system.Press this, and as we're used to from recent Canon compacts a toolbar appears down the left hand side of the screen, options highlighted or de-selected dependant on whether the user is in auto capture or one of the more fully featured creative capture modes. A high-sensitivity CCD sensor gives outstanding image quality in a wide variety of lighting conditions. Other options for the ring function are the selection of ISO speed, the tweaking of exposure (+/- 2EV), manual adjustment of white balance or as a stepped zoom, providing the equivalent of 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm and 105mm steps.

Shoot quickly with a lens control ring and get superior low-light performance with a high-sensitivity 10.The fast (f/2) lens and the decision to reduce the pixel count (hence reducing noise; also found in the G11) are particularly cited. The bottom line is that you always have to be attentive to the Canon S90's Control dial, except when shooting in Full Auto mode. It's the enthusiasts who are going to be miffed with the controls while using the creative settings, as well as those who want to rely on a single Scene mode (again, because the Control dial seems to select among Scene modes at random, thanks to its looseness).

This week, the World Photography Organization announced the shortlist for Student and Youth Photographer of The Year, part of the broader Sony World Photography Awards of 2024. There's a temptation to be disappointed with the Canon S90, mainly because our expectations are too high. If you already own a DSLR, and possibly also a bridge camera, ownership of the S90 - more portable and with nearly as much on-board sophistication - starts to make a little more sense.If your camera scores in those ranges, likely its a camera that can produce excellent image quality for the class of camera that its in.

For you, it may be a nice camera to add to your arsenal that you can bring backpacking, cycling, or any outdoor activity really.If you have time to make a photo, the Canon S90 has the patience to work with you and can usually make it happen. I take it on my multi-hour trail runs for nature shots and use it with an AquaPac for wet and underwater situations. The Canon PowerShot S90 handled chromatic aberrations very well during the review, with limited purple fringing present around the edges of objects in high-contrast situations, as shown in the example below. It's via the first folder that the user can enable such settings as iContrast and auto red eye reduction/removal, as well as blink detection and adjusting the image stabilization mode to come into effect only when taking a shot, when panning the camera, or have it on continuously. I find its 28-105mm lens range adequate for most shots, but of course prefer the G series 28-140mm range, or, S120's 24-120mm range more.