Canon S90- just when I thought I was out…

An issue of terminology.

Here’s a fun fact- Canon’s name is derived from the Buddhist figure Kwannon, a thousand armed lady of mercy, and the original prototypes were called Kwanon Cameras. They changed the name to Canon soon afterwards, and probably tossed out the mercy alongside it, because Canons are not exactly known for their ergonomics.

A while ago after years of shooting Canon equipment, I sold everything I had and went Nikon. Canon, why you insist on making bodies that are so eyeglass-wearer unfriendly I’ll never know. Recently though I thought a compact p&s body would be nice for portability’s sake though and great for Cherise to carry around, and I guess ol’ lady mercy decided she wouldn’t lose me so easily.

The Canon S90 is small- pocket size even, as long as you aren’t carrying much else in said pocket. They’ve also taken a brilliant engineering decision, and gone conservative with the megapixels (around 10), which leads to some solid low light performance for a point and shoot.

Darn clean at 800 ISO. Exterminates the competition. Sharp macro mode too.

What’s really cool about this camera though is a slight (very slight) analog touch- it has a rotating dial around the lens with different functions depending on the mode you’re using- in Aperture priority mode the dial sets the aperture just like on an old manual film camera, which is pretty awesome.

The lens is crazy sharp for a point and shoot as well, especially shooting in my preferred style- close and wide. Speaking of which, I can’t say what the maximum zoom is on this camera, because I keep it pretty much stuck on 28mm, the widest setting. This is also where you get the f2.0 aperture, making low light shooting great. That’s even better than the G series Canons, and has the same sensor to boot.

Good for the foodies. Valhalla Table fries.

Oh, and it does video too. Not HD, but reasonably nice VGA, and it’s a ton of fun. It’s convinced me that my next DSLR definitely needs to have video to play around with. This is perhaps not the S90’s video at its best, but it’s kind of hilarious. Cherise gives God of War a try for the first time- hardest difficulty. I think she did all right. This camera is awfully good at grabbing tidbits like this.