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

Product Information

I'd just taken a half dozen blurry shots of his brother in slightly less light before I gave up and switched to Auto, then his artwork was finally complete. Canon kept the S90's sharpening quite conservative starting at ISO 800, resulting in a Gaussian-blur appearance which sharpens quite well, it turns out. Canon gets extremely close to the ideal pocket camera with the PowerShot S90, close enough that a great majority of users will be extremely happy with it.

On that note though, Canon's point and shoot Smart Auto functionality works well, and reliably with it.He also covers almost anything connected to a PC, including keyboards, mice, USB-C docks and PC gaming accessories.

This is new line among ultra-compacts, compared to the well-regarded but mostly point-and-shoot SD-series. Throughout this range, the image I saw on the camera's screen was brighter than the scene, so the Canon S90 is doing some impressive work here, and there's not a lot of noise on the LCD as it gains up to show you what it can do. The new control ring around the lens of the S90 offers precise adjustment to focus, exposure, ISO, zoom, or white balance settings. 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.But can a compact camera of such credit card sized dimensions really produce images that real photographers would be proud of? In the default of FADE, you have to wait for the stupid animation to do a crossfade each time you select a different image.

The S90's shutter lag is likely to be the sticking point for some because it's really no better than an average point-and-shoot: 0. Unfortunately you can't adjust the ISO setting in Low Light mode, so I had to use my mini-blind to control the light in my darkened room on a rainy day.

With the race for more megapixels momentarily slowing at consumer level, it seems that small is the new big. Rarely does this pixel-binning method produce a usable image at 4x6, let alone anything larger, so we're impressed that it works as well as it does.