Canon PowerShot S90 review

Getting a compact camera noticed above the swell of £150 mid-range snappers is difficult, but as soon as you lift it out of the box, the S90's aspirations towards miniature-DSLR quality are obvious. The body is a comparatively chunky 175g and, with the exception of the battery door, made entirely out of metal. It feels luxurious and tough, and although Canon doesn't make any claims about its ability to withstand dust or water ingress, it's hard to believe it wouldn't outlast a cheaper camera.

A glance at the mode dial reveals another reason for the steep price. Unlike most compact cameras, the S90 has the full range of manual control modes. There's a green square mode for those who simply want to point and shoot, but it's supplemented by program, shutter and aperture priority modes, plus a fully manual mode for those who want to do everything themselves.

The luxuries continue with an unusual mode ring around the lens. Grab it and click it around and you can perform a number of tasks: in most modes it operates the optical zoom, although the fact that it clicks, rather than spins smoothly, underlines the drawbacks of not being able to make tiny changes to your shot's focal length. The ring can also control aperture, or ISO, and it's useful to have a large control interface to avoid having to constantly refer to the rather fiddly flickwheel on the back.

Canon makes bold claims about the S90's low-light performance, and you can set the ISO as high as 3200 - twice the maximum of some ageing DSLRs. Up to ISO 800 we had few complaints - at that higher setting a little noise started to settle in, particularly on solid-coloured backgrounds, but images were still easily printable.

It isn’t until ISO 1600 that a few images began to show disruptive amounts of mottled colours and noisy backgrounds. The top-end setting of ISO 3200 is more of a party piece, though, with rather murky images.

If you want to go even further, there's an "expanded" ISO mode which isn't accessible during normal operation, and you can push the ISO all the way up to 12500. The party-piece nature of this mode is underlined by the fact the S90 automatically reduces the maximum image size to 2.5MP from its normal 10MP.

The inclusion of RAW capture mode certainly isn't a party piece, but one slight disappointment is that the extra outlay on the S90 doesn't buy you much in the way of increased raw speed. Flicking the S90 to continuous mode saw us capture shots at a rate of just one per second.

The S90's high price means that it's not for the occasional snapper. But, if you simply don't want the bulk of a DSLR, the S90 offers fantastic build quality and great images, while the mode ring makes it quick and easy to change your shooting settings.

Author: Dave Stevenson