The Canon S50 hits its target straight as a ‘Bullet’

Author's Rating:

Pros: Simple use with a huge list of options for gadget junkies.

Cons: Unable to change lens (my little joke...read review).

The Bottom Line: 
i would recommend this camera for those who want the ease of a point and shoot with the need of professional options when the time arose.

Author's Review
The Canon S50 hits its target straight as a ‘Bullet’.


I received my Canon S50 as my Christmas present a few days ago. I have been playing with it for a few days straight and can already tell it is an incredible digital camera.

My wife actually got me this camera after hearing my complaints with my old Kyocera Fine Cam I got just over two years ago. She did all her own research from epinions.com and zdnet.com.

I originally would have been happy with a Canon A300 3 mega pixel pint and shoot but being the great woman she is, she got me, what I consider to be, the top of the line of the ‘point and shoot’ styled cameras.

I called my friend and I found that he also has one. He loves photography and has owned several top digital cameras which are all SLR’s except for the S50. He categorizes the S50 as a ‘pro-sumer’ camera. It has features similar to that of a professional SLR but with the ease of a consumer ‘point and shoot’.

I will compare this to my Kyocera point and shoot and some of the improvements of the Canon S50 has over it.

Size:

The Kyocera wins here being only the size of a credit card. The S50 is larger and heavier making it less comfortable to carry around in ones pocket. This would be the only disadvantage of the S50.

Both have a sturdy metal case. I have dropped the Kyocera several times on various surfaces and heights each time coming out unscathed. I can only assume that the Canon S50 is about the same.

Battery:

This has been the pain of my experience of digital cameras since their invention. Power hungry LCD screens and energy required to write and read to memory cards. There have been so many, many times where I was at the coolest place (like a private tour of the Waikiki Aquarium) and my proprietary battery dies. This has caused instantaneous fits of frustration and rage.

The Kyocera Finecam battery is very small, literally the size of a stick of gum. When brand new, you could barely squeeze 50 pictures out of it when using the flash and LCD screen. Over the time of two years, the battery got old and its ability to hold its charge decreased. I had to learn to immediately shut the screen off when turning it on, to save battery power in order to take a few more pictures. Even after all this compromising, the battery would only allow me at most 20 or so pictures.

My wife got me two batteries for the S50 and a charger for the car as well. She is so smart! I originally wanted a camera that took double AA’s so that I could be anywhere and buy batteries in a pinch. I think the problem with the Kyocera is that the battery is way too small, expensive (so that I did want to waste any more money buying accessories for the camera) and needed to be charged inside the camera.

I played with the S50 all day and I mean ‘all day’ taking pictures at various resolutions, shooting short movies etc. At the end of the day, the single battery that I used finally gave out! So I figure that two batteries would be more than sufficient for an active day on vacation.

Features:

The Kyocera has a sufficient number of features for a simple point and shoot. In this respect, it has been sufficient for my needs. It took pretty decent pictures with great detail when I printed them out.

The S50 features are numerous to list. Things like manual setting of aperture and shutter speed are great options if I ever needed them. Also, things like iso adjustment, continuous shooting, macro, 9 picture review grid, light condition adjustment (eg sunlight, fluorescent), special effects etc. To get the full listing of specs, because I feel that it would be redundant and boring to list everything (and there is a lot) please visit:

http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/s50-45/index.html

The coolest feature is that you can add voice tags to certain photos. Excellent for making custom notes!

Picture quality:

Here is where the most important attribute and possibly subjective attribute that a camera possesses.

The Kyocera took great pictures. Since it was my first digital camera, I was happy with the picture quality when viewed on a monitor. Printing the pictures, the quality was also very good. This is more subjective as the quality of the printed pictures depends so much on the printer.

The Canon S50 picture quality is in a word, outstanding. Balance and saturation of color is incredible to the eye when viewing on its onboard LCD screen and computer monitor. Prints were great. With the Kyocera, I had to edit the picture before printing by balancing the contrast etc. With the S50 images, I still get some red eye. This I had to adjust out but I haven’t had to really adjust anything else before printing.

The color trueness of the S50 was noticeable on the first day of trying it out. When I took macro shots of my hobby of reef aquariums, the color trueness came out.

On the Kyocera, the blues were greens and never really to true color. It was always disappointing to see the blues come out as greens and the greens looked yellow.

On the Canon, the blues looked blue, the yellows looked yellow and the greens looked green. Was it perfect to my tank color, no, but it is very close. To be honestly fair, the tank has supplemental actinic lighting, which is a light source in the deep blue region so it is most likely adding some false coloring.

The telephoto function is great in the optical mode. The images were very sharp and clear. It was not until my telephoto went into the 12X zoom that used digital zoom that the resulting pictures were not clear. This would be the only annoyance I have with the Canon S50.

Other pictures taken in ‘normal’ lighting, the color resolution was spectacular. The colors are deep and rich without any ‘artifacts’. I say this because picture imaging varies on so many factors.

I am not sure if I am buying into Canon’s hype about their Digic and Isaps technology for increased imaging performance but it seems to work. Ahh, the power of marketing.

Overall, I am overwhelmingly satisfied with the picture quality. Images are crisp, bright and vibrant.

Battery Life:

For the Canon, it greatly outperforms my Kyocera Fine Cam many times over. It lasted an entire day of taking 1-5 pictures for each time I turned it on. In addition, I ‘played back’ a lot of the photos at random intervals. I estimate that I took just over 200 photos in a day, reviewed them all and erased about 150 of them…all on one battery.

Ease of use:

This is where the Canon S50 can be as simple to use as any other digital point and shoot in the ‘auto’ mode or as precise with its option settings as any professional SLR (without the option of changing lens).

I am tired of reading and hearing people say that this camera lacks the ability of changing lens. It should be obvious to those buying this camera that the lens doesn’t change. I would recommend those who complain about not being able to change the lens to not get this camera because…you can not change the lens! Complaining about being unable to change the lens is like someone who bought a car with a manual transmission complains about having to move the stick around to drive.

Okay, enough of commenting about lack of common sense.

The camera is extremely easy to use. The auto mode produced very clear pictures about 95 % of the time. There were some pictures that were blurry because the auto focus was having trouble figuring out what to focus on.

The manual settings are there and ready for use if and when you want these advanced features. To me, it is better to have these present even if you use them just on occasion.

Is this better than the Kyocera? YES! The Kyocera had much more number of blurry pictures. I am not sure if it is because of a less sophisticated focus system or if it is the fact that it took a long time from the time you press the button to the time the shutter would open. I have noticed that this action tends to move the camera once the button is pressed.

Downloading Images:

In one word…‘easy’. There are two options to do this. My usual method is to just remove the compact flash card into the card reader. If you don’t have a reader, one can attach the supplied USB cable to your computer. I have Windows XP and it automatically recognizes the camera connected by the USB cable.

Conclusion:

I would recommend this camera to anyone who wants something more than a point and shoot without the hassles or expense of a SLR. Ease of use, picture quality and flexibility are all above average I would say.