Canon PowerShot S5 IS review

Image noise seems about average for its class. As a rule, you really don't want to rise above ISO 200; at that point, color noise becomes measurably and visibly apparent. You could probably get away with ISO 400 for certain types of scenes, but beyond that, you lose tonal range and detail.

I'm also split down the middle on image quality. Color looks great; it pops but manages to stay shy of oversaturated. White balance is excellent under a variety of conditions. But even at its sharpest, the S5 IS' photos generally look overprocessed and a bit smeary. Some of that fades to obscurity when you print, but if you're planning to crop your photos, it will become quite noticeable.

Canon's VGA 30fps motion-JPEG movie capture continues to be among the best we've seen--the tradeoff is a file size of about 2MB per second--though like most, it performs best when there's only some centralized motion. A lot of motion around the scene results in increased motion and compression artifacts.

With competitors like the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H9 upping the megazoom ante to 15x--and more important, opening up the wide angle--it's past time for Canon to introduce a new lens on its Sn series. The PowerShot S5 IS is still a pretty good megazoom but one that's slowly losing ground to the competition.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon PowerShot S3 IS

1.7 

1.5 

0.4 

Canon PowerShot S5 IS

1.6 

1.3 

0.5 

Fujifilm FinePix S700

3.3 

1.3 

0.6 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8

1.8 

2.7 

0.6 

Typical continuous-shooting speed
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

In seconds

Canon PowerShot S5 IS

1.6 

Canon PowerShot S3 IS

1.5 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8

1.5 

Fujifilm FinePix S700

0.5