Review of Canon S90

The camera I’ve been using to take these street photos is the new Canon Powershot S90 (which was also reviewed a few days ago in the New York Times). The S90 is designed to be a small pocket-sized camera, but with enthusiast features not normally found in cameras this size, and with a relatively high price of $429 (which is what I paid for it at Best Buy a few weeks ago).

Unless you’re a camera nerd, or interested in buying a new camera, you can skip reading the rest of this blog post.

The purpose of this camera is to be really small, but still provide enthusiast level photographic controls. Stuff like aperture priority mode, shutter priority mode, full manual mode, and raw files. Stuff that’s missing from nearly all inexpensive “point and shoot” cameras. In addition to better in-camera software, the camera has an f/2.0 to f/4.9 28-105mm lens (expressed in full frame equivalent focal lengths), and a front control ring which can be set to dial in a focal length (my preferred use for it) or set to control various other camera functions such as ISO or exposure compensation. The S90’s 1/1.7” image sensor is 52% larger than the 1/2.3” sensor typically found on point and shoot cameras.

Although it’s not the smallest digital camera you can buy, it’s still pretty small. Anyone who looked at it would think it’s just a regular point and shoot camera, and not realize that it’s a serious camera. Photographers who want their cameras to look really cool will be disappointed—it lacks the retro look and heavy metal feel of certain other enthusiast cameras.

The image quality, in unchallenging lighting conditions, comes pretty close to DSLR quality. In the central areas of the frame, the camera has pretty much the same resolution as my $600 12MP Olympus E-620 DSLR with the $500 14-54mm lens. The S90 falls behind at the corners where it suffers from significant corner softness. I find the lens performs worst at “28mm” and f/2.0—the corners are extremely soft at this setting, especially the corners on the right side of the frame. Quality improves noticeably upon stopping down just to f/2.2, yet no matter how much you stop down, the corners are never fully sharpen up.

Exposure metering is disappointing. I have to keep the camera at -2/3 EV exposure compensation to keep it from routinely blowing out highlights, but sometimes at this setting you will get an underexposed photo. The camera’s internal software should be smarter.

Canon’s marketing emphasizes the camera’s high ISO ability; partially this is a testament to the fact that imaging sensors keep improving, and partially it’s marketing hype because at ISO 800 the S90 looks almost as bad as the Olympus E-620 at ISO 3200.

Because the out-of-camera JPEGs are severely oversharpened, and there’s no way to completely turn off the sharpening or the noise filtering in the camera, in order to get maximum quality out of the camera you need to shoot RAW. Furthermore, the RAW image processing program which comes with the camera (Canon Digital Photo Professional) does a much better job of correcting chromatic aberration and barrel distortion than the in-camera JPEG engine.

Is the camera worth twice the price of regular point and shoot cameras? Yes, because it’s the only camera this size that will give you this feature set. No, because I don’t see why it costs Canon twice as much money to manufacture this camera. Sure, the sensor is a little bigger and the lens is a little bigger, but for the price of this camera you could buy a DSLR with a sensor more than four times as big as what’s in the S90.

The genre of photography in which the S90 excels is street photography; that’s the taking of candid photos of people in the places where people are normally found (not necessarily the streets). Tiny cameras like the S90 don’t attract attention to the photographer. Like all other cameras this size, the shutter is nearly silent; the photographer can hear it in a quiet room, but it’s unnoticeable outdoors. So if you want to join the ranks of the few and the elite who do street photography, don’t waste your money on an overpriced Leica M9. The Leica M9 does not have a silent shutter, the depth of field is too shallow to do effective zone focusing (unless the zone is really narrow), and it’s not a tiny camera you can casually hold in one hand as if it’s an iPhone or a Blackberry.

UPDATE

Here are links to the Imaging Resource website which does a much more technical review than I can do. Compare the Canon S90 to the Canon G11:

Canon S90
Canon G11

You can clearly see how the S90 has noticeable corner softness compared to the G11, and also at telephoto the S90 image loses contrast, a problem which the G11 doesn’t have. The G11, unfortunately, is a physically larger camera, but it does seem to have a better quality lens.

Comments

[Stuart]

Half
thanks for the review - could you do more posts that feature comments from and discussion with David Alexander? He is the most interesting voice on this blog. Coming from Haiti he brings a unique perspective

[Easy Peasy]

Stuart is either David's sock puppet, or there actually exists someone interested in ...

Nice picture.

[HS: "Stuart" is someone who always comments with a different pseudonym, but I see no evidence that he or she is David Alexander.

David Alexander is a friend of the blog, and I hope he continues to visit.]

[Stuart]

I am not David Alexander -

I can take steps to prove my identity as a successful high IQ non NAM person.

The reason why I find David so interesting is that David obviously has a very high IQ, and he comes from a group that has lower than average IQ. The complexities of that situation are special - I mean, does he feel affinity for other members of his group or for other high IQ people?

If there was conflict in our society, whose side would he be on?

I myself feel solidarity and kinship with other high IQ people, not with people of the same ethnic group. I always wonder if I am peculiar in that regard?

[Haumea]

"I myself feel solidarity and kinship with other high IQ people, not with people of the same ethnic group. I always wonder if I am peculiar in that regard?"

No. With one caveat -- that's they're not evil/sociopaths/pathological liars. Which eliminates most Marxists.

As far as DA, only recently is he coming to a realization that typical black resentment toward whites and high-achieving blacks is not historical grievance or cultural self-affirmation but essentially IQ ENVY.

[Zeenon]

I was just wondering but what is your opinion on the Fujifilm F70exr or F200exr? They're like half the price of the S90, but they seems to be in a similar position in the market.

[HS: The F200 isn't a pocket camera. The F70 doesn't have RAW, and the lens is slow compared to the S90. The super-duper zooms on both the Fujis is not necessary for the kind of photography I do.]

[Heh]

Is that Lou Dobbs?

[Mark Seecof]

Please, could you tell us whether the S90 has a long shutter delay (that is, whether it waits more than, say, 100 msec from the time you press the "shutter" button until the time it captures the image)?

I'd really like to know because I'm deeply annoyed and frustrated by the seemingly-interminable delays (often 500-1000 msec) built into most compact digital cameras. I'd buy this one even for the big bucks if it would just take the photo when I press the button (assuming I've already focussed, of course).

[HS: In manual focus mode, the shutter delay is definitely a lot more than 100 msec. It's not instantaneous. Somewhat disappointing considering the lens doesn't have to focus.]

[C]

You should compare this to the Leica X1, Ricoh DGR, LX3, sigma dp2, ep-1, gf-1, as all these are good for street photography.

Btw, as you probably noticed, processing the raw file from an s90 is horrible, since it has horrendous barrel distortion.

Also, when you compare it to DSLR quality, do compare it to a modern full frame dslr such as 5dmk2, with a good lens (say the 35L) that outresolves the sensor. With a dslr you get a lot more uses, such as landscapes (with a ZE 21/2.8), portraits (say with a 85L), tilt shift use (TS 17, 24 and 90 are all beautiful), tele for birds, sports, etc (hard to best canon's tele), low light, macro (combine the 5d with the CV 125 apo macro), infrared or ultraviolet (coastal optics 60mm apo macro is world class), etc. Relatively cheap, the dslr market offers the most choices by far. Moving up to medium format, you'll see that things progressed slower there, and they have fewer uses, only a little bit more quality, and for a lot more money, say Leica S2 (with basically a smaller sensor size than other MFs) with a full range of lenses is about 120k.

[HS: If you'd like to give me a Canon 5DmkII and a 35L lens, sure, I'll take them!

The software corrects the barrel distortion, so you don't see it, thus as long as the photos are sharp, who cares?]

[BrunoBrazil]

Siggy

It´s off topic, but perhaps you should blog about the imminent market correction in the USA.

The price of Houses, Colleges and Healthcare are skyrocketing much faster than incomes. Can you see here a higher education bubble about to burst?

The biggest problem in American is that education and houses are ridiculously expensive, forcing people to get crushing debt. Can you imagine the prices crashing on the next 5 years?

[Leon]

I like the discussion of photography here.

Doing street photography is important to me, but performance in low light is crucial.

To me the major difference between DSLR and compact cameras is the low light performance.

Anyone on this blog own a compact camera with spectacular low light and bright light performance?

[HS: The S90 has world-class low light ability at wide depths of field. If you have to stop down a full frame camera to get the same DOF as the S90, it will probably have inferior low light ability compared to the S90.]

[Dan Kurt]

re: "It´s off topic, but perhaps you should blog about the imminent market correction in the USA."
Posted by: BrunoBrazil | November 16, 2009 at 07:05 AM

Spend the money and subscribe to many of the services of:
Elliott Wave International [http://www.elliottwave.com/]
Specifically: Elliott Wave Theorist, Financial Forecast and The Socionomist. Also, order and read Robert Prechter's Conquer the Crash, Second Edition.

If you have any money left over subscribe to: Dow Theory Letters
[http://ww2.dowtheoryletters.com/]

For free read the Market Ticker [http://market-ticker.denninger.net/].

Dan Kurt

[HS: And don’t forget Mahendra Sharma, the astrologer/prophet who makes stock market predictions: http://www.mahendraprophecy.com/

He has amazing accuracy. For example, he once predicted that there would be violence in the Middle East, and he was dead-on accurate.]