Canon vs Nikon: Point-and-Shoot Face-Off

1. Canon PowerShot S90

Two camera giants, two point-and-shoots over $300. Will the projector-equipped S1000pj prevail, or will the "standard" features on the S90 win out?

Canon has brought back the PowerShot S series, which had been asleep since 2005, with an S90 that has a lot to recommend it – a new 10 MP CCD sensor with a new technology for electronic noise processing, a bright, stabilized zoom that starts at f/2, a 3-inch display screen, and the possibility of saving files in Raw format, all in a compact and rather elegant-looking body. Does Canon have a rare pearl here?

Handling

The little PowerShot S90 is handsome-looking with its restrained design, but it may be a little too stripped-down; the metal body is well finished, but there are no places on the front for your fingers to rest on. At least it’ll slip easily into your trouser pocket. But let’s not be picky – the S90 is a well-designed camera, and even has the rare feature of two dials for adjusting shooting options. The first is the control dial on the back of the camera (surrounding the selection joypad). The second is in a more unexpected location – around the base of the lens. It’s a little unusual, and takes a bit of practice to get used to, but after a few hours of use we found it to be a quality innovation.

The customizable control ring can be set to adjust the aperture, ISO sensitivity, focusing, zoom, white balance, or exposure compensation. So it’s a complement to the control dial, usually dedicated to exposure compensation, but in M mode you can use the two rings to juggle between aperture and exposure. That’s better than on some SLRs! In fact, as on certain SLRs, it’s possible to save a configuration of your own (C mode) in addition to the traditional P, S, A and M modes.

The S button is also customizable – you can assign the white balance adjustment to it (note that you can correct the color dominants on the amber-blue and green-magenta axes). The graphical interface is very congenial and fairly intuitive, and there’s contextual help with certain terms that may be a little too technical for some users.

The Canon S90’s LCD display is also quite good, with its 3-inch screen with a resolution of 460,000 dpi. The display is very fluid, even in low light (though the image is very grainy), which is very appreciable. The viewing angles are wide and the color rendering is acceptable.

One annoyance with the battery: when you open the card/battery compartment, the camera completely locks up. You have to turn it off and start it up again to be able to use it again. Also, the On/Off and Ring Func. buttons are too close together.

Response

Other Canon compacts are more responsive. The start-up took just over a second, but the wait between saving two shots was a little long (more than three seconds), both in JPEG and Raw mode. The autofocus is still the genuine article, but a little slower than on certain models, in particular the G11. Also, the autofocus mode is limited to focusing either at the center or in automatic multi-zone. You can’t select an off-center zone as you can with the G11’s FlexiZone.

Image quality

Like the Canon G11 and the Panasonic LX3, the S90 has one of the "largest" sensors currently being used – a 1/1.7-inch. That’s significantly larger than the traditional 1/2.3-inch 12 MP sensor, but still much smaller than the 4/3-inch sensor used in the Panasonic GF1 and the Olympus Pen E-P1.

With a definition of 10 MP, the photodiodes are larger and can theoretically collect light more easily. In practice, the S90’s sensor (like the G11’s) does quite well. Note that at 80 ISO, the grain is already quite visible, and it increases moderately as values increase up to 800 ISO. At 1600 ISO, smoothing gets heavy and eats into the details a little, but the shot was fairly good overall even on our A4 print.

Of course you’ll want to avoid pushing the S90 to its limits, especially since the Low Light shooting mode can go as far as 12800 ISO (with reduced definition) on the automatic setting. Comparison with the LX3 is inevitable, but it’s tricky. The S90 comes out slightly ahead, however, especially at 800 ISO, producing cleaner more detailed images.

The JPEG processing leaves in some chromatic aberration and purple fringing, but in general the images are good – exposures are correct, and an i-Contrast option can add detail in dense areas. Running Raw images through DPP totally removes chromatic aberration, and we wonder why the function wasn’t built directly into the S90.

The flash works well and we have no particular comments to make on it. The macro mode, which lets you focus as close as 2 is also adequate, and the stabilization built into the lens works well, as is often the case with Canon cameras.

Video

The video mode was something of a letdown, especially by comparison with the PowerShot S80, the first compact to deliver 1024x728 video (at 15 frames per second). There’s no 720p HD video, whereas several less up-to-the-minute compacts offer that option. Here, you’ll have to settle for an "ordinary" 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second. The quality is good, but it is 640x480. The optical zoom is not available during video recording and the sound isn’t in stereo. In short, the video mode is nothing to write home about. But there is a built-in HDMI connection that lets you view your images on an HDTV.

The Canon PowerShot S90 is a noteworthy small "expert" compact. Its two adjustment dials make for good user comfort, and it delivers handsome shots up to 800 ISO. It’s a shame that the video mode isn’t on a level with the camera’s pretensions.