Rob Barron
Loves the place
Registered: September 2006
Location: Poole, Dorset
Posts: 5386
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Review Date: Tue November 27, 2007
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £215.00
| Rating: 9
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Pros:
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Excellent quality, lots of control, good for beginners and advanced users
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Cons:
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Lens not L series! Noise at high ISOs
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It's hard to know where to start when reviewing this type of camera so let me give you a touch of background as that will help you see why I bought it and my review will then make clear whether it met my expectations.
I did not actually buy it for me but for my wife.... ssshhhh, it's her Christmas present but I had to test it out fully before giving it didn't I!.... My wife had no knowledge of photography whatsoever until she got sick of me telling her to 'wait up' while I stopped to take yet another shot with my Canon 10D, 20D, 40D.... and before those various compacts and pro-sumers.
I wanted Di to learn the basics of taking good pictures, not to get bogged down with the 'how' of technically taking a picture. So i went out and bought her a basic Canon A400. This left little for the snapper to do other than point and shoot but my wife constantly listened to advice on composing a shot. She soon becamse very good at 'seeing' the picture to take and her ability overtook the camera's ability to produce good shots. The A400 was ok but exposure and resolution were not as good as we would want today. We went on holiday to the Lake District a few weeks ago and she dropped her A400 (deliberate ploy? Only she knows for sure but....) and the camera was ruined. A new camera for Christmas then is it darling?
I did a bit of research and then a friend lent me the camera he had just bought. It was the Canon S5 IS. I gave it an exhaustive testing and was very impressed with what I saw.
The processor in the S5 is none other than the DiGIC lll which is exactly the same as the one used in the 40D, the camera I now use as my first choice and which I love. No question that the processing is excellent. The exposures are excellent, very well balanced and the resulting 8megapixel images show great detail in areas that many a prosumer camera would render as black or white.
The image stabilisation is very useful and works very well because instead of being body-based, it is lens based. I am a firm believer that the main problem with shake comes from where the light travels through, ie the lens, so lens-mounted IS is more effective. I know some will argue for sensor mounted IS systems but let's leave that for another time. There is a very clear difference when you zoom in a long way and then take a shot with and without the IS system in action and frankly I can't imagine why I would ever switch it off for my wife, other than perhaps if she is using it on a tripod.
The zoom is an excellent 12x which has the 35mm equivalent of a 432mm lens. It isn't an L series lens but the quality is still up to Canon's high standards. The AF is extremely fast, very often I wasn't even aware of it going through the focusing motions as it just snapped into sharpness. Using the auto-face detection system is something I frowned on at first thinking it all a bit silly. However, I now see its usefulness in that it allows the camera to select an aperture that will give enough depth of field to get all the people in view. Given that DoF is generally much bigger than on a dSLR anyway, it does mean that group shots, weddings, et al will produce sharp records of everyone, not just those nearest the bride and groom!
We have all seen red-eye reduction that pre-fires the flash in an attempt to shut down the iris before firing.... and generally producing naff results! They do shut down the iris but that simply gives a smaller dot of red. The system employed here is basically integrated to the face detection system. It recognises where faces are and is then able to see where the eyes are so if it detects two spots of red in the eye areas, it converts them to black.... a much more effective system. I tried indoor shots with flash to see if I could get red eye but failed totally. The system therefore works extremely well.
One thing I wanted my wife to have is more control over the technical side of shots than she could previously have with the A400. She is slowly learning about apertures, shutter speeds, reciprocity etc. and this camera allows her to have as much control as she wants, be that fully automatic, semi-automatic as either Tv or Av, and fully manual. This will allow her to grow and develop and have enough camera to let her do that without it being so complex that she gets discouraged, something I am determined will not happen.
Any downers? Yup, the ISO settings can go out to 1600 but frankly I wouldn't dream of shooting with that as the noise is terrible, nothing like the fantastic noise reduction systems employed in the 40D and other SLRs. It is fine at 100 ISO, actually goes down to 80 ISO as well, and 400 ISO is perfectly acceptable. I wouldn't bother with 800 ISO unless desperate and will be advising her to simply never use the 1600 ISO, the picture quality is simply not adequate.
But hey, we are talking about a camera priced at £300 in the UK (£215 on Onestop!) not £600 so expecting an L series quality lens and superb noise reduction is unrealistic. At this price point I think this camera is outstanding in its quality and results.
It can also be used as a very good video camera. Yes, I know what you're thinking: you don't buy a camera to take video. You're right, I have a £2000 video camera that is near-TV quality so why would I want a camera to take videos? Well, putting it bluntly, because it can.... and does very well! It can do 640x480 resolution (standard VGA resolution) or 320x240 resolution and with a decent sized memory card can shoot for long enough to be practical. A 4Gb card can shoot an hour at the lower resolution. I was very surprised at the results of the higher resolution and wouldn't hesitate to use it if I wanted to just grab some quick bursts of video. You would certainly not see the video and immediately say it had been taken on a compact camera.
Ok, in finishing I will just say this is an excellent camera for someone not ready willing and/or able to spend out on a dSLR. It is of course far more portable and capable of producing cracking results at a resolution you could happily enlarge to A3. Processing is excellent, AF is fast and accurate and the IS system is very effective. I'd prefer it to use CF instead of SD cards but that is common in the smaller cameras and the price of cards now means a 4Gb one is very cheap, under £40. It has plenty of control but also has plenty of automatic settings, a huge variety of pre-programmed modes to shoot in for everything from sports to snow and beaches.
All in all this is a very good camera and anyone finding this in their stocking will be writing very positive thank you letters to Santa 
Cheers all,
Rob
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