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Image stabilisation, a wide f2 aperture and an oversized sensor all make for superb low-light photography, for example rock gigs in small venues without professional lighting rigs. It's got a great lens and great features and is only let down slightly by the inevitable handling issues that come with such a small camera. But, pared down to the essentials (which includes a quick start guide in the box and full manual on provided CD only), there's nothing initially about the S90 that feels extraneous or gimmicky. The image quality is something to consider, I mean, what can a camera introduced in August of 2009 do these days compared to newer technology?
A compact at ISO 80 is about as noisy as a DSLR at ISO 800, and the S90 gives me much cleaner, clearer files at ISO 80 than any other compact. zoom providing a four stop advantage claims its manufacturer, 3-inch, 461-dot resolution LCD in the absence of its bigger brother's additional optical viewfinder, side mounted HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) port, plus Digic 4 processor and exposure adjusting iContrast function now a standard feature across the Canon family. As ISO hits 800, though, Canon has defaulted to a very soft interpretation of the scene in its JPEGs, which is the polar opposite of what the Canon S90's competition has done: the Panasonic LX3 sharpens the heck out of the image.Telephoto, however, has some chromatic aberration that appears in the center and corners, which can reduce contrast and cause some image softness in very bright areas. More surprisingly for a compact with a width not a great deal broader than your credit card, both Raw and JPEG capture are also offered. lens, then the ISO range from 80 to 3,200, and finally the Canon S90's DIGIC 4 processor does quite a job on the raw file before saving it as a JPEG. No color bleeding or color shift to speak of, no banding, even though this is decent light (low kitchen light), I can tell this sensor performs well. However, like most of Canon's PowerShot line, ISO 400 is about the limit before you start seeing softening of fine detail.
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. The low light mode is a new addition to the Canon range, boosting ISO up to an equivalent ISO12800, with the trade off being that resolution drops to a relatively lowly 2. You could say that a shot like this in nice window light would look good with any camera, and you'd be right, but not necessarily at ISO 800. Trick: If the camera is off, hold the PLAY button a few seconds to wake it up in PLAY mode without having to extend the lens. I find its image quality desirable overall with good to excellent looking raw files, all the way up to its highest ISO setting of 3200.This is especially important, because the flaky rear dial of the S90 is often knocked by accident, setting you to ISO 3,200 instead of AUTO, thus this automatic reset corrects this by magic. He also covers almost anything connected to a PC, including keyboards, mice, USB-C docks and PC gaming accessories.
Look closely and there's some smoothing of the skin due to DPP's noise suppression, and the eyelashes have some chroma noise dancing around them, but it's really not noticeable in prints up to 11x14 inches. The base of the camera meanwhile features a screw thread for a tripod attachment just left of centre and a sliding door with catch protecting slots for the provided lithium ion rechargeable battery and optional SD/SDHC card, both of which slot relatively easily into place. Most serious enthusiast photographers would trade megapixels and zoom range for better image quality in low light, because it better avails us of the light all around us.Unfortunately it's not a complete coup thanks to the wayward rear Control dial and the slow zoom control. Another nice feature is the Canon S90's offer of a choice when deleting an image captured in RAW+JPEG: You can choose to delete both, or just the RAW or just the JPEG. This is new line among ultra-compacts, compared to the well-regarded but mostly point-and-shoot SD-series.
It's bright aperture on the wide and, included image stabilization allow me to shoot in low light hand held. Crucially it also offers some of the best image quality we've seen in such a small camera for a long time, sensor limitations aside. Now we can get back to the pursuit of photographic excellence, rather than the continued "bigger is better" contest. It's important to note that there's no optical viewfinder on the Canon S90, so all adjustments will need to be made via the LCD.My opinion is that compact digital cameras that came after 2007 or so showed a marked increase in image quality over predecessors. The remaining shooting modes put more and more settings under your control: Program AE, Shutter priority, Aperture priority, Manual, and Custom. and the size is so small and thin that you can carry it in your front jeans pocket whenever you go out. Okay, makes sense: the key adjustment you can make to exposure in Program mode is ISO, so the Front dial controls exposure by default.
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