Canon S90 – now the problems

I’ve been toting 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 term “snapshots” deliberately. This will in no way replace a DSLR with a 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens for serious work. That said, it covers the other 90% of cases very well. It’s incredibly portable, much more so than Canon’s brick-like G9/10/11 series. So anyhow, some comments:

  • I believe the RAW files are 12 bits deep, consistent with other cameras that use this sensor type. Since I’ve been playing with “expose to the right” and dragging things back from the highlights, this has been good. And it works, unlike 8-bit which give an ubrupt break at the top of the histogram.
  • I discovered that it has a live histogram. Which is great when you’re trying to expose to the right! Cameras seem to expose conservatively to preserve highlights but pushing +1EV and pulling back in the editor renders better quality.
  • Compared to an SLR, the dynamic range seems to be less and the images less sharp. I rarely notice fringing or poor edging with the Nikon even zoomed right in. With the S90 it’s a lot more obvious.

Now the big one: reds.

I’ve been doing concert photography for over five years and red light is the bane of the the concert photographer’s life. When you start out shooting gigs and don’t know what’s happening, you end up with photos where, say, the singer’s face is posterised and washed out in red. Converting to black and white can’t save it and even shooting RAW is of limited use. What’s happening here is that the camera is scrabbling around for greens (grass) and blues (skies) to meter on, not finding much and exposing for it. This lets in way too much red causing the washout. With experience, you learn to manually expose or set -2EV.

Now to the S90: it suffers from this in spades. Consider the following shots:

The first picture and the first histogram go together. Notice how much red there is at the right end of the histogram and that there is no detail whatever in the flowers. The second photo is at -1.3EV and still very red-heavy and lacking in detail.

Is this a problem other people have? Am I doing it wrong?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 1:24 pm. It is filed under Photography and tagged with , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

4 Responses to “Canon S90 – now the problems”

  1. Justin Smith says:
    June 13, 2010 at 10:35 am

    Hi I bought the S90 for family snaps, I have no real experience in photography but even to my untrained I, was very dissapointed with my S90 results on Auto, with really artifical looking colours especially on reds, with loss of detail in pictures looking like a highly compressed jpeg. Having read the above (your more specific/technical explanation of whats going on makes sense. I have emailed canon to see if I have a faulty s90 because apart from your blog I cant see this problem mentioned much. Have you managed to sort this out or just resigned to the S90 not being that good.

  2. davehodg says:
    June 13, 2010 at 10:57 am

    First up, make sure you’re always shooting at the highest resolution: “L” in the menus. That should prevent the worst of the jpeg jaggies. I tend to shoot with the S90 very much “on the hoof” or in poor light so I’m resigned to a little shake and poor edges most of the time.

    Better still, shoot RAW, but that’s potentially a whole new world of pain best avoided if you’re starting out.

    The saturated reds issue only occurs for me in scenes with a predominance of red as you see in the images above. And as you can see from the histograms, it’s just plain unbalanced.

    The best solution I’ve some up with so far is to go into the “My colours” function setting, then choose “Custom Colour”, hit “Disp” and pump up the blue and green and knock back the red settings. That seems to even out the RGB histograms somewhat.

    Also, I *never* shoot in “Auto”. I’m usually in “P” and if I’m shooting JPEG I always set the white balance manually.

    Don’t be afraid to mess with the settings, you can always reset them in the menu!

    If you post some pics to flickr, we can always have a look and see what’s going on!

    Cheers, Dave

  3. Justin says:
    June 16, 2010 at 10:52 am

    Thanks for that now shooting in p mode with colour adjusted, and white metering.
    And set the s button to take a light meter reading quickly has definitely helped the red issue but you do get some odd results with the light meter and sometimes need to repeat it, I guess you could set manually but getting away from the purpose of why I went for a compact then …
    Thanks again,
    Justin

    Ps canon just replied reset it and if not happy take to be mended, did not mention tendency of the s90 to oversaturate with reds on auto…

  4. davehodg says:
    June 16, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Justin, thanks for the update.

    I’m not surprised by Canon’s response. If you can be bothered, it might be worth going back to the store with something red and textured and doing a like for like comparison.

    And you’ve taken the first steps towards getting off “auto”, well done :)

    I’m having fun with the B/W and “positive film” mode at the moment…

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