Canon PowerShot S100 review

For Canon’s newest high-end compact, understatement is the name of the game. The PowerShot S100’s plain design, diminutive size and seeming paucity of controls suggest something quite basic.

Look more closely, though, and you’ll notice the mode dial offers not only the familiar Auto and Scene options, but also shutter priority, aperture priority and full manual controls. Evidently, this is a compact that’s aimed at enthusiasts, and if you delve into the menus you’ll also find options for exposure bracketing and RAW capture – enabling those who are willing to process their own images to get the very best from the S100’s large 1/1.7in sensor, and even create HDR composite pictures.

Perhaps the S100’s most exciting feature for creative photographers is manual focus. Many compacts let you select a specific area on which to focus, but this is the first we’ve seen to offer a focus-ring around the lens to tweak. It works very well as an immediate and natural interface.

Unfortunately, the compact format doesn’t leave space for an optical viewfinder: although the S100’s LCD screen is rich and colourful, its limited resolution of 460kpixels makes it possible to slightly miss your focus. As insurance against this, Canon has provided a clever focus-bracketing feature, which will automatically take three photos in quick succession, with the focus adjusted very slightly forward and back of your original manual setting.

If you prefer, the adjustment ring can also be assigned to other parameters: depending on the mode you’re in, this can give you a quick way to step through settings including aperture, shutter speed, white balance and exposure compensation.

All these features would be of limited value if the image quality were lacking, but we found the Canon PowerShot S100 produced consistently excellent photographs, with good punchy contrast, well balanced colours and no shortage of detail across all of our test pictures.

One particular standout was our flash-lit party scene: by opening up to its maximum f2.0 aperture, the S100 was able to give impressive warmth and clarity to the scene, while nicely softening the background. The long-distance text test was well rendered, too: some sharpening was visible from the JPEG rendering process, but letter details were among this month’s more precise.

Video performance, shot at 1080p and 24fps, was just as strong, with bags of detail and rich, well-balanced colours. The zoom mechanism is just about audible over quiet moments, but should be unobtrusive under dialogue or music.

Our test images reveal one optical limitation of the PowerShot S100: its zoom is comparatively short, topping out at 120mm equivalent. There should still be enough here to cover typical portraits and landscapes, but it would have been nice to have been able to get a little closer to the action.

The S100’s real problem, however, is performance. Even with the focus set in advance, we measured a lengthy half-second between the shutter being pressed and the image being recorded, and a shot-to-shot time of more than two seconds. For carefully composed shots that may be an irrelevance, but even the most measured photographers occasionally want to capture a scene that’s unfolding before their eyes. For that sort of photography, the PowerShot S100 feels disappointingly laggy.

A similar criticism can be made of the electronic menu system. It’s attractively designed and easy to navigate, despite the number of advanced options, but it suffers from the shadow of a lag that makes it less of a pleasure than it would otherwise be.

One area where the PowerShot is fast is battery charging – a full charge is quoted as taking only 2hrs 5mins. But that provides only enough power for 200 shots. A dedicated snapper experimenting with the various settings on offer will get through that very quickly indeed. Turn on the GPS logger, which tracks your travels as well as geotagging your images, and you’ll find yourself running out of juice even more quickly.

Despite these weaknesses, the PowerShot S100’s manual controls and excellent image quality undeniably elevate it above the crowd of advanced compacts. If you’re a novice curious about expanding your photographic skills, it’s a tempting proposition, albeit an expensive one. If you’re an enthusiast wishing for a DSLR that will fit in your pocket, you won’t find anything closer.

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