Our Canon S30 PowerShot Digital Camera: A Review

Morgan Brown Research Adventures Images Scenery Kim & Morgan Mom & Dad Digicam Review Canon S30 Powershot at Amazon.com... CLICK HERE - Prices have come down from $600 when I bought it to $499 as of March, 2003. Used cameras for $335. ^ ^ | | S40 S30

To answer Bill's questions:

• The resolution of the Canon S30 Powershot is ~3.3 megapixels. That works out to full-sized images of 2048x1536 pixels. The highest-quality internal JPEG compression produces output images of about 1 megabyte in size, with no discernable compression artifacts.
• I do not use any type of filter on the lens. In fact, I don't believe that this camera lens accepts any type of filter, though I may be wrong. The Official list of accessories does not include filters. The clarity of the sky probably has a lot to do with the lack of smog in northern Montana!

• LCD Screen - The achilles' heel of almost every digicam, and apparently, the S30 in particular. On one of the first uses of the camera, a friend was taking a picture and apparently dropped or bumped the camera, and cracked the LCD screen in the process. Canon replaced the screen for $150, which was reasonable. However, I dislike the fact that the camera's user interface is almost 100% through the LCD. They crack easily and are hard to see in the sun. They gobble battery power. Old SLR cameras had the entire visual interface in the viewfinder--why can't the digicams do this? My advice: if you plan to use your camera in the outdoors (bright light, rough use), find one that can function at least minimally without the LCD screen.
• Resolution versus shutter speed - Hey, all things being equal, more pixels are better than fewer. But if the sensitivity of the CCDs in the camera is such that super-human shutter-speeds are required to hold the camera steady, then all that resolution goes for naught. I believe that the camera's default shutter speed in most circumstances is simply too slow. I have a steady hand, and I very often get image blurring. Moreover, the camera's shutter release button requires a hard and sustained press, and makes holding the camera that much more difficult. From the Canon Spec Sheet, notice that, "At Auto setting, camera automatically adjusts sensitivity in the range of ISO 50 to ISO 100 equivalent."
• Battery Life - The battery life on this camera is great. We would guess that one could shoot around 150 images before draining the battery. Still, we bought a backup battery and have found it very convenient.
• Memory - The default 16MB smart card is insufficient. Spend $50 and buy a 96MB+ card. You'll never have to think about filling the card in most cases.
• Movies - The S30 can acquire low quality AVI movies with sound. For some low-light examples, check out our Shady Rock climbing movies. The movies have a maximum length of 30 seconds (too short) at the highest quality (still crummy) setting. At this length, they are about 8 megabytes. You cannot zoom in or out once the recording has started. Don't even bother turning the camera on its side to record unless you have excellent movie processing software (the package Canon provides is a joke). I paid extra for the movie capability. In hindsight, I'd say that if you have any ambition whatsoever to shoot movies, get a real digital camcorder. Still, it's nice to fool around once in a while with movies.
• Manual Setting - The camera does have a full manual setting. In theory, this is very interesting; you change the shutter speed and aperture, and the resulting exposure is shown on the LCD screen. HOWEVER, I don't believe the image on the screen accurately represents reality, because the images I've taken don't seem to come out anything like what I saw on the screen. In any case, for bracketing purposes, this feature is nice. In low light situations, I can open up the aperture and simply change shutter speeds. Hopefully the one where I didn't shake was exposed properly.
• What resolution to use? - If you're going to show your pics on a webpage, where you realistically have to resample to around 800x600, why bother recording all those pixels at all? For one, having lots of pixels affords you the ability to crop the images closely to fake a zoom. That, my friends, is the mystery of "digital zoom". Anyway, if you want to print you'll need the pixels. And hey, you never know, in five years, we might be surfing the web on 300 dpi screens!
• Convenience - Bracketing becomes much more realistic when you can simply delete the obviously bad images. But if, as mentioned above, the LCD screen does not provide a totally accurate depiction of the image, then it's dangerous to delete images based on what you see on the screen.

	Blurry. Here Kim was trying to snap a photo of me while climbing. Her hand was belaying me, but still, on such a sunny day, the shutter speed should have been fast enough to catch me without blurring. Wrong!
	"Fringing" effect. See the fringing around the edge of the bright sun? You don't get this on a normal camera. My colleague Bob gave me the following explanation. Current technology has separate CCDs for red, green, and blue. Each channel is then combined into a single pixel, but you can see that positioning errors result. I believe that this is the reality, but I don't know if it's the cause of the fringing. All digital images (still or motion) seem to suffer from this effect.
	Ass-kicking! - This panorama from the west slopes of Going-to-the-Sun Mountain in Glacier National Park blows my mind. Canon provides a good panorama-making software, PhotoStitch. It's great to be able to make these panoramas. No scanning, no dust. And look at the good exposure and sharpness. Still, compared to a perfectly exposed film slide, this photo looks a bit washed out.
	Fast motion shots - I've complained about low shutter speeds, but in this case, the cascades of the waterfall were captured without a problem. The nifty panorama sofware allowed me to make this cool shot.
	Low light. This scene was stunningly beautiful in real life. Still, it was dim, so to capture it, I knew I'd have to bracket. So I opened up the aperture and bracketed shutter speeds. This was the only non-blurry one, and it seems a bit underexposed. The default sensitivity of the CCDs is low. Users must adjust! Still, if you can hold it steady, you can get some great results.

Department of Geophysics Stanford University

Modified: 05/07/06, 16:55:52 PDT , by morgan
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