Digital Trends

Canon PowerShot S80

January 2nd, 2006 | by David Elrich

Performance

Once you slide the front panel back, the camera jumps to life in less than two seconds. This is great for anyone who wants to grab a quick snap. The camera immediately asks you to set the date/time and the jog wheel makes this adjustment as simple as can be. The onscreen menus are very legible and fairly well designed. Like all Canons, the key mode dial is broken into a Creative Zone and an Image Zone. Creative is for manual options like aperture- and shutter-priority, Program AE, full manual and custom for your individual preferences. The Image Zone lets you choose between 12 Scene modes with such things as Fireworks, Portrait, Snow and so on. There's also a stitch assist for panoramas, My Colors to change the overall hue of an image and the movie mode. This is more than enough firepower for the vast majority of photographers. There is no RAW setting, however.

I took a number of shots of a beautiful blooming Christmas Cactus with myriad purple flowers. Shooting Super Fine 3264 x 2448 pixel files in Auto, Manual Focus and a variety of other settings I was very pleased with the 8.5x11 prints turned out by a Canon Pixma MP780 printer. They were picture post card pretty. I also liked the response of the camera as there was very little shutter lag or grabbing to focus the subject, even the thin, inner flower pistils. That was definitely a shortcoming with recently reviewed Olympus SP-500. Auto focusing was quick and on target. A quick move into Manual Focus brings up an enlarged frame so you can really zero in on your subject. The camera uses Canon's nine-point AiAF as a default but by using the FlexiZone option, you can choose from over 200 points in the frame on which to focus. I did find the LCD screen to be a bit lacking, especially indoors even with the built-in gain up. And the refresh rate needs improvement as images blurred as the camera was moved from one scene to the next. 

As noted, the S80 is very responsive but it's here that its lack inner firepower shows up. The camera is rated 1.8 frames per second which is decent for a point-and-shoot but poor compared to a D-SLR rated a minimum of 3 fps for affordable models such as the Canon Digital Rebel XT or Nikon D50. This is not a big-time knock for the S80, just us pointing out this camera may not be just right for you if sports photography is a key interest. But realize a D-SLR will set you back several hundred clams versus this PowerShot.

Digital noise is better than some of the other compact 8-megapixel cameras out there and it's noticeable at 200 ISO and above. This is fairly typical (ISO range is 50-400). Noise quality of D-SLRs is much better though.

The Canon S80 is the first camera to offer an XGA movie mode with sound and it's rated of 1024 x 768 pixels at 15 frames per second; most other quality digicams offer 640 x 480 at 30 fps. Using a 512MB card you can record about 4 minutes of video at the top end. Although the resolution is better the frame rate is somewhat of a bust. It would be great if they could bump it up to 30 the next go-round. Still the quality is good with nice contrast but you won't mistake it for MiniDV footage. To me the movie mode on a digicam is a nice gimmick and good for taking a quick clip, nothing more. For the record: D-SLRs do not capture video clips in any way shape or form. If you record at the highest quality (1024) you cannot use the zoom while recording but you can in 640 x 480; it's a 4x digital zoom though, not optical. After shooting some clips, they were viewed on a 4:3 Toshiba digital TV through the front A/V inputs. Results were a bit jerky in high rez but again this isn't a MiniDV camcorder. For fun clips, it's just fine. And if you do capture something great as a video, the camera lets choose a frame so you can make a print.

Image Courtesy of Canon