Canon Powershot S90 - samples

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koffiejunkie

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I had a brief play with an S90 today, and wow, I'm impressed! A few quick observations, sorta kinda vaguely compared to the G9.

- It's a bit smaller and much lighter than the G9. The body is a good plastic rather than the metal.

- You can either not disable NR or I haven't figured out how.

- It doesn't have as many buttons/dial as the G9. ISO, for example, is in the menu instead of the dial.

- The ring is awesome!

I took a few test shots, just my shoes on the floor. I did the same thing with the G9, just to see if it's different. The S90's colour, under this particular light, is far more accurate.

IMG_0012_RAW_640x480.JPG


Full size JPEG (4MB) and converted RAW (8MB)​

JPEGs are straight out of the camera, converted RAW was done with DPP. I left everything on defaults except for NR which I disabled.

Crops follow in the next post (15 image limit).
 
I wouldn't go as far as saying it might be all I need (much less all I want) but I want it too - perfect pocket cam!

I was amused at the absence of chroma noise, for the most part. So I loaded up some CR2 files from the 40D and 50D, and sure enough, they look a heck of a lot better than in Aperture and Camera Raw/Photoshop/Lightroom. It's like the in-camera NR but I can back of the luminance NR (a.k.a. smearing/smudging). This makes Noise Ninja useless to me.
 
koffiejunkie said:
I wouldn't go as far as saying it might be all I need (much less all I want) but I want it too - perfect pocket cam!

I was amused at the absence of chroma noise, for the most part. So I loaded up some CR2 files from the 40D and 50D, and sure enough, they look a heck of a lot better than in Aperture and Camera Raw/Photoshop/Lightroom. It's like the in-camera NR but I can back of the luminance NR (a.k.a. smearing/smudging). This makes Noise Ninja useless to me.
Click to expand...
Not following you - you loaded them up into where?

The files, particularly the RAW ones, look pretty good . . . at least up to ISO200.
 
bwana said:
Yeah - too bad the software is so klunky.

My flavour of the day is the Dfine plugin for aperture.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I wish Canon would license their routines so Apple can build it into Aperture. Using DPP, the 50D's files are less noisy than the 40D (which was already pretty good), but in Aperture they're significantly more noisy.
 
I'm still interested in the S90 despite whatever rockwell's conclusions were. I rolled my eyes at "If I still wasted my time with DSLRs, my camera would still be wrapped up in its case somewhere not making pictures." and stopped reading.
 
bwana said:
I'm still interested in the S90 despite whatever rockwell's conclusions were. I rolled my eyes at "If I still wasted my time with DSLRs, my camera would still be wrapped up in its case somewhere not making pictures." and stopped reading.
Click to expand...

You actually read it? :eek:

I guess he got tired of his D40 then...
 
Pity there is no CHDK available for that model. My SX200is arrives in a week or so from e-bucks (R3000 equivalent!!!) I'll post similar piccies to compare.
 
steve-rsa said:
Pity there is no CHDK available for that model. My SX200is arrives in a week or so from e-bucks (R3000 equivalent!!!) I'll post similar piccies to compare.
Click to expand...
I'm sure it will come eventually - the one for my 400Ds only appeared a short while back but it gave them a new lease on life.
 
I've reworked the RAW ones in DPP after getting used to it a bit more. The ISO3200 now has less chroma and more of the white grain - I'm not sure how to get rid of that without losing detail. But suffice to say, at anything but 100% view, you couldn't tell. I'll post some later.

My friend took delivery of it and the feedback so far has been very good. I'm looking forward to getting mine...
 
So I played around some more with the raw files in DPP, and after getting a bit more used to it, I think I have better results. These are still pretty much defaults, except that I generally backed off the default NR in DPP. Someone more skilled than I can probably make these look really good.

RAW_0012%20-%20Version%202.jpg
RAW_0012%20-%20Version%202.jpg

ISO 80 * ISO 100

RAW_0014%20-%20Version%202.jpg
RAW_0015%20-%20Version%202.jpg

ISO 200 * ISO 400

RAW_0015%20-%20Version%202.jpg
RAW_0015%20-%20Version%202.jpg

ISO 800 * ISO 1600

RAW_0018%20-%20Version%202.jpg

ISO 3200​

There's a clear shift in sharpness after 200 ISO, but even so, what this camera does from 400-1600 ISO is better than anything I've seen out of any other compact or bridge camera.
 
ISO800 looks really good, especially compared to 400, I can barely see any difference. And 1600 looks great too.

If money wasn't a problem I'd buy a S90
 
koffiejunkie said:
There's a clear shift in sharpness after 200 ISO, but even so, what this camera does from 400-1600 ISO is better than anything I've seen out of any other compact or bridge camera.
Click to expand...
Big difference.
 
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