Canon PowerShot S2 IS user reviews

4.5 stars

"Good but with some niggles" on July 11, 2005 by HayleEye

Pros: Great Optics

Cons: Lens cap and port covers

Summary: Having owned a canon S2IS now for a week and having had both SLR and digital cameras before my overall impression of the S21S is that it is a very capable piece of kit that has much to offer both the novice and the more experience user.

The camera has a nice feel, solid without being too bulky and sits well in the hand. The best feature has to be the lens. Canon have always been noted for excellent optics and the x12 optical zoom is no exception giving remarkable clarity across its range with little evidence of distortion or fringing even at the extreme of its range. The additional x4 digital zoom is nice to have I suppose but is sensible disabled by default, better to shoot and then crop the 5mp image using your favourite software I feel.

There are one or two niggley things however which detract from the overall pleasure to use that the camera generally is. The most striking and soonest discovered is the appalling lens cap. It’s a fairly slack push-on affair which all too readily falls off. On the good side it is readily pushed aside by the lens should you forget to remove it before switching on, but surely canon could have come up with a better solution, on a camera of this quality its such a let down.

I found the Electronic viewfinder quite crisp and clear with most of the symbols quite intuitive. The substantial rubber surround means that even spectacle wearers can get up close and the dioptre adjustment is a real boon.

The image stabilisation (IS) seems to work reasonably well allowing hand held exposures to be made at quite low shutter speeds in low light and/or with the zoom lens extended.

The flip and turn LCD screen at the rear of the camera is somewhat of a novelty, its quite nice I suppose that it can be turned around so that the screen is recessed in the camera and is protected but beyond that it seems to be a gimmick with very limited use in the real world. A larger LCD screen protected by a sliding cover would have been of much more practical use I feel.

The flexible rubber covers on the USB and AV ports are also quite poor in design, the have to be prised off with the fingernail to insert the connecters and are secured by fairly flimsy rubber stalks which look like they wouldn’t take much to break them off.

In common with many compact SLR replacement cameras the lens lacks a filter thread which I find a bind. True the vast majority of users would not perhaps want to be able to use any of the vast range of creative filters that are available, but my expertise has shown that a UV filter permanently placed over the lens offers a lot of protection to the valuable optics and is something I miss.

Quite why Canon and other manufacturers of high resolution cameras insist in supplying a mean 16Mb SD card is beyond me. It is of such low capacity 5 or 6 images at high resolution, that its just not worth the effort of opening the packet. I wish they would either pack a decent sized card 256MB or better, or just not bother and knock a few pence of the price.

I find the gentle beeps that the camera issues in normal operation to be very positive and its volume can be varied. Even better it can simply be muted as required for occasions when extraneous noises are best avoided. I can’t help thinking however that the manpower spent on providing ‘optional alternative noises’ such as the sound of a dog barking when the shutter is fired, could have been better spent on other aspects of the design.

Of course the real test of any camera is the quality of the images it produces and despite the shortcoming outlined the S2IS produces some quite stunning results. Its Auto Mode and is able to cope with a range of scenes and conditions while shutter and aperture priority and even full manual control are available to those more demanding users.