christophe thinks out loud

Canon PowerShot S50

I finally broke down and got a digital point-and-shoot camera. I’ve carried around a Yashica T4 for years, and I love it . . . but I was getting tired of missing shots because I hadn’t remembered to load it. Also, to be honest, most “look, there’s a great shot!” moments turn out to be not such great shots in retrospect, but you only discover that after you’ve paid to have the film processed.

The Canon PowerShot S50 seems to occupy the same niche as the T4 used to: It’s a point-and-shoot that Real Photographers won’t call you a girlie-man for using. Digital Photography Review has their usual encyclopedic review of the product.

I’ve only had the S50 for a couple of days, but here are some first impressions.

For a digital camera, the user interface is well-designed. (Although I’m a hardcore Nikon bigot when it comes to SLRs, I will freely grant you this: Nikon user interfaces suck, and their digital camera interfaces suck hard. I’m told the D2H has a good UI; I haven’t quite had the fiscal resources to investigate it.) If you don’t need to change the settings very often, the menu system is fine; otherwise, you can spend a while trying to find the particular setting you need.

As just about everyone who has reviewed the S40/45/50 has mentioned, the “joystick” multicontroller, which is used for just about everything, feels mushy and imprecise. Not a disaster, but something with a firm click would have been much better.

The shutter lag is annoying, like just about any digital camera currently on the market, but not nearly as bad as the previous generation of digital point-and-shoots.

The features that I find particularly nifty about the camera are:

Full manual modes — The S50 does, of course, have the stupid automatic modes that cameras are encrusted with these days, but you can defeat them and set aperature-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual modes. It even has a manual focus mode, although the autofocus seems fine.

RAW file format — You can save and download files in RAW format, and play with them later. This is very cool, especially if you didn’t set the white point quite right when you took the initial picture. The downside of this is that Canon’s software, at least for the Macintosh, is slow and stupid; I’m hoping that the RAW plug-in for Photoshop is less painful to use.

A macro focus setting — You can get up close and very personal. This is very nifty if you see just the right flower or whatever, and want to take an extreme closeup.

Custom white point setting — Like the big digital SLRs, you can set the white point against a photo gray card, or a white target. While you can in theory correct this later, it’s always better to get it right the first time.

All in all, it’s a nice little camera. It is a bit hard to find, and I suspect that Canon might be in the process of discontinuing it (it’s slightly over a year old, which is about 76 in digital camera years). Of course, this does mean that clearance prices might be forthcoming, too.

posted 20:47