| Game Title: | |
| Developer: | |
| Publisher: | |
| Review Score: |   |
| User Score: |
|
Canon S3IS Digital Camera Review
By Nemesis_22 - Wed Oct 18, 2006 4:25pm
I shall warn you from the outset. This is one of my favourite cameras in the compact range, so I shall dwell lovingly upon it. Get comfortable.
The S3IS is the third of Canon's high zoom performance range of cameras, which started with the S1IS, then, strangely enough, the S2IS, before settling on this number. Personally, I reckon they should have called this one SKickass. Really bring the message home.
Lets go over the oh so boring numbers and statistics to begin with. The S3IS is a 6 megapixel camera, with 12X zoom and an image stabilizer, another of the ultrasonic series. The ultrasonic stabilizer is usually found on SLR lenses, so it should be a mechanical one if it wears the same badge rather than an artificial one which shrinks the CCD, but I cannot prove it one way or the other.
The lens is fast. Very fast. At no zoom, it's a lower than average 2.7 aperture, and it goes up to a mere 3.5 at the full zoom, much better than most. There are two viewing options for your leisure – a focus adjustable eyepiece, and a 2 inch rotating flip screen on the back to use when you just cannot get the angle the way you want it – or don't want to look like a twit contorting yourself about. Here are a few photos at no zoom all the way up to full zoom – and a couple of others that I just liked a bit pop up a bit later.
No Zoom vs Full Zoom
...and again
It uses 4 AA sized batteries, and use at least 2600 mAh (the strength measurement rating) to get the best out of the camera. Get a kit with a car charger if you ever dream of going traveling, and you should be all set. The camera uses SD memory, like most cameras (apart from the black sheep that are Fuji, Olympus, and, naturally, Sony) which is good because you can change brands easily if something better comes out and SD cards are cheap as biscuits. Chips are still slightly cheaper.
It is big, but compact for what it can do. It sits in the hand well, with a good grip on the front with a bit of a rubber to give you something to hold on to. Most buttons are a slight movement of the thumb away, but due to the large number of them, they are spread out a bit. The large number of buttons is both an advantage and a disadvantage, for while there is less hunting around in the menu to find a particular function, you instead hunt around the camera for it instead. Once you get to know the locations, however, you should be able to do quick changes without even looking for them, which is infinitely preferable.
Hmm, what else should I mention...
Did I forget to say its eyeball-popping fast?
Time from no zoom, to full zoom, less than a second. Time from one picture to the next, less than a second. Time from taking a shot from prefocus is much less than a second – all but instantaneous, in fact.
Speed is very important in photography, because being a bit too late is exactly the same as much too late when it comes to taking photos. You don't get a second chance sometimes. The S3IS excels in appeasing us anxiously impatient consumers and does its damnedest to be as quick as possible without losing the oh-so important quality.
However, the speed of the zoom, while fantastic, can be a curse at times. If you are too eager, you might just over-zoom the target when you only wanted to get a bit closer. And at full 12X zoom most cameras, including this one, can hunt about a bit to get the focus correct. Still, if you can take the time to get the zoom right, the times where you do need the max zoom as quick as possible will result in a much higher level of appreciation.
The flash is a manual pop up, and carries fairly well indoors, but like all compact camera flashes, don't expect the world from it. Here are a few indoor flash shots, and you can see the light bouncing back a fair distance away, but remember this is a fairly well let area, so don't expect similar results in lower light.
Flash with No Zoom vs Flash with Zoom
The camera has a range of quick select modes – portrait, night, landcape and sport, but it has quite a few more lesser used scene modes quietly tucked away. It really starts to get interesting, however, when you start to mess about with the manual settings.
The camera has full control over its shutter and aperture speed, either one controlling the other or both separately in the manual mode. There is no quick select wheel so it can be a little more awkward than you would prefer, but the fact remains that the option is there and you can take full advantage of it. Which is good! You get much more of a feel for what a shot can do when you control exactly what goes on in when taking it, and while this is not an SLR, you can do very similar things in this regard as an SLR, even manual focus, achieved in a fairly unusual way by pressing a button and then using the direction pad on the back of the camera to adjust the focus slightly.
This manual focus is a bit iffy. Use the automatic instead.
More playing with zoom: a landscape, and some pretty clouds.
There is also control regarding ISO settings and your white balances in the camera- white balance basically being the amount of red, green or blue being allowed into the shot to compensate for certain types of light or even to exaggerate them. Such as tungsten, which adds a lot of blue to the shot, which can be used to either make a very, very blue photo or to work with a contrasting colour to create some fairly weird effects.
There are two types of macro mode – one is standard macro, and the other, achieved by holding the macro button (found on the side of the lens near the manual focus button) down for a few seconds, is super macro mode. The super macro mode changes the focal minimum distance even more, and the difference I got were these two –
So you can get pretty darn close with super macro, as you can see.
There are variable timed release modes, as well as a continuous shooting mode. The timed release activates after either 2 or 10 seconds, or a customized time. The burst mode, or continuous shooting, is limited in its shots, about 5 in a row in a quick burst, or in a gradually slower and slower unlimited mode. This is where the camera starts to lose out severely to a good SLR.
But don't worry, it comes good again.
The camera has movie mode, which SLR's do not. However, at full resolution – 640x480 at 30 frames per second – you get a mere 15 minutes and 40 seconds of total movie on a 2 gigabyte SD card! That's pretty fierce and very demanding. You can, however, drop the resolution down – in fact, its possible to get an unheard of (for a digital camera) 60 frames per second at 320x240 resolution. But this is a camera, right? So what other camera stuff does it do?
Well, there is one more thing. Colour Accent and Colour Swap, like most good Canons tend to do.
I had a lot of fun with this. Colour Accent and Colour Swap can be used with macro mode, and a few other modes beside I am sure, and I took full advantage of that fact. Its used as a scene mode, so its easy to find, and you use the center focus point to pick out which colour you want to select. With Colour Accent, you pick out only one colour, with everything else becoming monochrome. And with Colour Swap, you simply pick one colour and then pick another colour with which to completely reverse the first. So, to show you, here are some Colour Accent shots of simple yellow and then green, like so –
Colour Accent: Yellow and Colour Accent: Green
Then I did a bit of work in Macro Mode –
Before I went completely bananas in Colour Swap mode and made it look like the Apocalypse had come to Bendigo.
Run! The sky is asploding!
Ahem.
Anyway, I think I should move on to the conclusion.
This is a great camera, and probably the best amongst the current high zoom range, at least overall. It has good quality, good speed, good adjustability... it all adds up and makes it excellent in the end. It is a big step up from the older S2 and S1, and it goes just one step closer to blurring the line between an SLR and a compact. SLR cameras are still better, of course, but this closer to that level than just about anything else that is currently available.
The S3IS is the third of Canon's high zoom performance range of cameras, which started with the S1IS, then, strangely enough, the S2IS, before settling on this number. Personally, I reckon they should have called this one SKickass. Really bring the message home.
Lets go over the oh so boring numbers and statistics to begin with. The S3IS is a 6 megapixel camera, with 12X zoom and an image stabilizer, another of the ultrasonic series. The ultrasonic stabilizer is usually found on SLR lenses, so it should be a mechanical one if it wears the same badge rather than an artificial one which shrinks the CCD, but I cannot prove it one way or the other.
The lens is fast. Very fast. At no zoom, it's a lower than average 2.7 aperture, and it goes up to a mere 3.5 at the full zoom, much better than most. There are two viewing options for your leisure – a focus adjustable eyepiece, and a 2 inch rotating flip screen on the back to use when you just cannot get the angle the way you want it – or don't want to look like a twit contorting yourself about. Here are a few photos at no zoom all the way up to full zoom – and a couple of others that I just liked a bit pop up a bit later.
)
)
No Zoom vs Full Zoom
)
)
...and again
It uses 4 AA sized batteries, and use at least 2600 mAh (the strength measurement rating) to get the best out of the camera. Get a kit with a car charger if you ever dream of going traveling, and you should be all set. The camera uses SD memory, like most cameras (apart from the black sheep that are Fuji, Olympus, and, naturally, Sony) which is good because you can change brands easily if something better comes out and SD cards are cheap as biscuits. Chips are still slightly cheaper.
) Canon S3Is |
Hmm, what else should I mention...
Did I forget to say its eyeball-popping fast?
Time from no zoom, to full zoom, less than a second. Time from one picture to the next, less than a second. Time from taking a shot from prefocus is much less than a second – all but instantaneous, in fact.
Speed is very important in photography, because being a bit too late is exactly the same as much too late when it comes to taking photos. You don't get a second chance sometimes. The S3IS excels in appeasing us anxiously impatient consumers and does its damnedest to be as quick as possible without losing the oh-so important quality.
However, the speed of the zoom, while fantastic, can be a curse at times. If you are too eager, you might just over-zoom the target when you only wanted to get a bit closer. And at full 12X zoom most cameras, including this one, can hunt about a bit to get the focus correct. Still, if you can take the time to get the zoom right, the times where you do need the max zoom as quick as possible will result in a much higher level of appreciation.
The flash is a manual pop up, and carries fairly well indoors, but like all compact camera flashes, don't expect the world from it. Here are a few indoor flash shots, and you can see the light bouncing back a fair distance away, but remember this is a fairly well let area, so don't expect similar results in lower light.
)
)
Flash with No Zoom vs Flash with Zoom
The camera has a range of quick select modes – portrait, night, landcape and sport, but it has quite a few more lesser used scene modes quietly tucked away. It really starts to get interesting, however, when you start to mess about with the manual settings.
The camera has full control over its shutter and aperture speed, either one controlling the other or both separately in the manual mode. There is no quick select wheel so it can be a little more awkward than you would prefer, but the fact remains that the option is there and you can take full advantage of it. Which is good! You get much more of a feel for what a shot can do when you control exactly what goes on in when taking it, and while this is not an SLR, you can do very similar things in this regard as an SLR, even manual focus, achieved in a fairly unusual way by pressing a button and then using the direction pad on the back of the camera to adjust the focus slightly.
This manual focus is a bit iffy. Use the automatic instead.
)
)
More playing with zoom: a landscape, and some pretty clouds.
There is also control regarding ISO settings and your white balances in the camera- white balance basically being the amount of red, green or blue being allowed into the shot to compensate for certain types of light or even to exaggerate them. Such as tungsten, which adds a lot of blue to the shot, which can be used to either make a very, very blue photo or to work with a contrasting colour to create some fairly weird effects.
There are two types of macro mode – one is standard macro, and the other, achieved by holding the macro button (found on the side of the lens near the manual focus button) down for a few seconds, is super macro mode. The super macro mode changes the focal minimum distance even more, and the difference I got were these two –
) Normal Macro | ) Super Macro |
So you can get pretty darn close with super macro, as you can see.
There are variable timed release modes, as well as a continuous shooting mode. The timed release activates after either 2 or 10 seconds, or a customized time. The burst mode, or continuous shooting, is limited in its shots, about 5 in a row in a quick burst, or in a gradually slower and slower unlimited mode. This is where the camera starts to lose out severely to a good SLR.
But don't worry, it comes good again.
The camera has movie mode, which SLR's do not. However, at full resolution – 640x480 at 30 frames per second – you get a mere 15 minutes and 40 seconds of total movie on a 2 gigabyte SD card! That's pretty fierce and very demanding. You can, however, drop the resolution down – in fact, its possible to get an unheard of (for a digital camera) 60 frames per second at 320x240 resolution. But this is a camera, right? So what other camera stuff does it do?
Well, there is one more thing. Colour Accent and Colour Swap, like most good Canons tend to do.
I had a lot of fun with this. Colour Accent and Colour Swap can be used with macro mode, and a few other modes beside I am sure, and I took full advantage of that fact. Its used as a scene mode, so its easy to find, and you use the center focus point to pick out which colour you want to select. With Colour Accent, you pick out only one colour, with everything else becoming monochrome. And with Colour Swap, you simply pick one colour and then pick another colour with which to completely reverse the first. So, to show you, here are some Colour Accent shots of simple yellow and then green, like so –
)
)
Colour Accent: Yellow and Colour Accent: Green
Then I did a bit of work in Macro Mode –
)
Before I went completely bananas in Colour Swap mode and made it look like the Apocalypse had come to Bendigo.
)
)
Run! The sky is asploding!
Ahem.
Anyway, I think I should move on to the conclusion.
This is a great camera, and probably the best amongst the current high zoom range, at least overall. It has good quality, good speed, good adjustability... it all adds up and makes it excellent in the end. It is a big step up from the older S2 and S1, and it goes just one step closer to blurring the line between an SLR and a compact. SLR cameras are still better, of course, but this closer to that level than just about anything else that is currently available.
More News
Suggest News
RSS Feeds
Digest Subscriptions
