A while ago I bought a Canon PowerShot SX230HS for my ‘carry around’ camera. Its primary purpose was to document our daughter. I loved the movies generated by the SX230 and the zoom range is great, but the JPEG sharpness isn’t great. To be honest, they images are fine for prints up to 8×10 (without cropping), but I’m used to the image quality of a Canon EOS 7D RAW and that’s probably just unfair to the 230.
I want more sharpness.
The PowerShot S90 and S95 weren’t contenders due to, in my opinion, stupid limitations in their use. The S95, for example can’t zoom while shooting video. That would drive me crazy. That’s part of the reason I got the SX230 to begin with.
Now Canon has this new flagship PowerShot, the S100. On paper it seems to have everything I want: RAW, fast lens, zoom with video, small size, RAW, etc. The camera was announced to ship in “November” and I actually found one in stock at a local Best Buy (ironically the same store where I got my 7D) so I grabbed it to play with.
Unboxing the camera was no surprise – the S100 is very similar to the S90 and S95 that came before. It is a small camera with a great feel. The body feels metal, but I’m not sure that it is. I can say, however, that I can see why there is an aftermarket grip. I’ve seen one on an S95 and it makes this small camera feel more substantial in the hands. The popup flash is fully automatic, you can’t pull it open yourself as you can on the SX230.
At this time, the only app that can handle the S100′s RAW files is the included Canon Digital Photo Professional. I don’t like DPP, but I’m stuck with it for today. For testing I plan to shoot RAW+JPEG so that I can import into Aperture and be able to work with the JPEGs for now.
My initial (and very informal) test shots show the S100′s flash to be way too powerful at times. I’ve never shot with a camera that would fairly consistently run the flash at least 2 stops too bright in full-auto mode. I did a reset of all camera settings and it is still doing it. There don’t seem to be enough S100s in the wild for many other reports to come in yet but I’m going to be watching for others who report this.
Today I’m hoping to do some shooting.
Oh, and this may be my first post to make it across to Facebook.
