Canon Powershot S90 – first impressions – Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography, London

Canon Powershot S90 – first impressions

Anyone who knows me, know that I pretend to be a Nikon bigot: “Nikon make microscopes and Canon make photocopiers”. It’s a bit of a front, since I started on Canon.

So, since coming to Taipei, I’ve been itching to have a camera to hand to capture the day to day, and indeed night by night, oddness all around but I’ve not been carrying the D300 and the iPhone just hasn’t quite cut it.

Luckily, Canon to the rescue! I’d always had a sneaky hankering after the G9/G10/G11 series but for P&S boxes they are hellishly chunky. From passing through Hong Kong to arrival in Taipei there has been wall to wall advertising for the S90. Good timing.

So, I checked the price on the interwebs, walk into a store, pay a little more but pay on Amex but still less than the best price on Amazon UK, and walk out with a shiny little toy.

As far as I can tell, it has *everything* I want in a walkabout camera:

Up to ISO3200. Sure it’s going to be as noisy as hell, but if it catches a decent histogram, it won’t be too bad (and from pics I’ve seen, this is true).
RAW. Not entirely sure if the bit-depth is more than 8 bits per colour per pixel (it’s 12 or 14 on the D300). But it’s still RAW and all that entails.
28mm-105mm equivalent zoom range.
f/2.0 lens. Depth of field baby, oh yeah.
Image stabilisation – not something I’ve ever fretted about before being able to get sharp pics at 1/15s at up to 70mm on the big camera but on a small camera it’s a nice to have.
Lots of scene modes. I know lots of pros and keen amateurs sniff at these but they’re a fast short-cut to what you’d choose for a given environment anyway so learn them and use them. I said so.
Some fun in-camera processing like antiquing images
Live histogram display! That was a surprise!

Everything seems to be in the right place and there are some nice ergo features like a ring round the lens for zooming.

All in all a very nice little package.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 2:30 pm. It is filed under Photography, Travel and tagged with canon, Photography, powershot s90, review, taipei. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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S90 review: the walkabout camera « says:

February 26, 2010 at 2:01 pm

[...] 26, 2010 by Sam Dave Hodgkinson has purchased an S90 while in Taipei to be his day-to-day camera for capturing anything that takes his [...]

C.C. Chapman says:

February 27, 2010 at 5:09 pm

I recently got one of these as well and am in love with it. I’m finding that my 50D sits at home a lot more often then it use to.

valerie says:

March 15, 2010 at 1:30 pm

Problem is that a point and shoot( even if it is a very good one) is never the same as a DSLR and if you want to take pictures that are not of family, children, pets etc then they are limiting. I use a DSLR with various lenses but I do hanker after a camera to put in a pocket but then I remind myself that i want to take good photos and not record shots – difficult one. Also I have been told that the screen still is hard to see in sunny weather which is off putting.

davehodg says:

March 19, 2010 at 4:56 am

I think the gap between good P&S and SLR’s is narrowing.

I’m going to try an experiment shortly and shoot some of a gig with the S90.

This is where the D300 should excel: 80-200mm f/2.8, ISO3200 and pinpoint spot-metering. But I wonder if with the right wrangling 24-105mm on the S90 might not be coaxable into producing decent results.

BTW, recent S90 pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davehodg/

All on the first page except the bottom right were taken with the S90.

Embarrassed by your camera? I am... - Page 7 says:

April 5, 2010 at 11:41 am

[...] [...]

Canon S90 – now the problems | Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography says:

April 22, 2010 at 1:24 pm

[...] the S90 for a couple of months and I’ll say this first: it’s a fine piece of kit. Since my first blog post on the subject, I’ve taken around a thousand snapshots with it and can comment on it further. I used the [...]