Canon's PowerShot S80

After plenty of research I bought a pair of the new Canon S80's, one for me and one for Chris. Sounds silly, I guess, to say I spent lots of time picking a point-and-shoot, but these little gadgets are important to me. When I got back into photography in 1998, after twenty-odd years of quiescence, I started with a Ricoh GR1. Some of my best photos have been made with point-and-shoots, both film and digital.

I've used my S80 for a couple of weeks now, and here are my impressions. I can't help comparing it to the Canon S50 I bought a few years back, which did yeoman service but annoyed me with its shutter lag. The S50 is a bit heavier and feels more solid; the S80 has what seems to be a thin plastic exterior, textured and colored to look metallic. (It succeeds in looking cheap, which it's not.) The S50 can be gripped firmly – there's even an indentation in back for your thumb – while the S80's hard to hold, since wherever you put your thumb it falls on some button or wheel. The S50 writes images to a standard CF card, while the S80 takes a so-called "secure digital" card – one more thing to buy.

But the S80's access to its features is a good deal easier than the S50's; common tweaks like a change of ISO speed or exposure compensation are tied to buttons, not menus. The LCD screen's bigger and better; it has almost no motion lag and can be viewed in bright sunlight. It's seldom necessary to use the viewfinder, which is good news, since it's pitifully inadequate.

Optics and imaging are excellent, especially for a digicam with such a small lens and sensor. The zoom's widest wide angle is supposedly equivalent to 28mm with a 24x36mm format, though no exact comparison's possible because the S80's aspect ratio is 3:4 rather than 2:3. (I much prefer 3:4 myself.) That's nice, since few digicams offer such a wide lens. On the downside, at that focal length the S80's zoom isn't very sharp, and the corners of the frame are frankly blurred, with chromatic aberration. Cropping them off leaves you with something longer than 28mm.

At longer focal lengths the lens is excellent, though its aperture range is limited. You can use 2.8 for the shorter focal lengths, but at full zoom (equivalent to 100mm) the widest stop is f/5.3. I'm staying away from f/8. Simple photos-of-the-wallpaper testing (of both cameras) showed serious loss of sharpness and clarity at that aperture, as well as a loss of linearity in exposure – 1/25 at f/8 doesn't produce an image as bright as 1/50 at f/5.6. In these little cams the same mechanism's used for both shutter and diaphragm, and f/8 seems to kick it out of spec.

Sensor noise, always one of the weaknesses of cameras that put plenty of pixels (in this case 8.3 million of them) on a tiny sensor, is well controlled. At ISO 50 it's no problem at all. At ISO 400 it's intrusive, but images are usable for most purposes, or at least for most of my purposes. No higher speed is offered.

Finally – and this is hard to quantify or even articulate – there's something about the images that I can only describe as the "Canon look." The colors and textures and contrast go together somehow to give results a realistic but slick look and feel that suits me perfectly. As imprecise shorthand I'll say it reminds me of the look and feel of medium format. This is a quality I valued greatly in the S50, and the S80 is better yet.

Ugh, that really is imprecise. Guess it's better to show than tell. This S50 photo has the look I'm trying to describe: Anti-Bush Rally, NYC. And so does this S80 shot, or this one. Hope those help you get the picture, so to speak.

The S80 has several shortcomings that don't bother me – its macro capability, or incapability, for example. There's no RAW mode, which is annoying but not a showstopper. The zoom and focus aren't lighting fast, but they'll do if you prefocus and don't expect to work with children or pets. Compromises are the order of the day when you pack so much into such a small box.

I'm happy. What I wanted was a camera to use when I don't have my EOS 20D, or when I don't want to use it because it looks too threatening, and the S80 fills that bill. Because it fits into my briefcase or a cellphone holster, it's always there, and the results I'm getting are damned good – certainly better than the results I wouldn't get if I had no camera. Absent a dpreview test of Fuji's new E900, which may beat the S80 for low noise at high ISO, I'm satisfied.

For a very thorough technical evaluation of the Canon PowerShot S80, see the review at www.dpreview.com.

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PS: FWIW (add two dollars and you can get on the subway), here's a note I sent to Fiertel about the S80 earlier this week.

Still feeling it out. I'm getting the hang of it. It does so many things I have no particular interest in, like you can swap one color for another, or of course make movies, or run an intervalometer. No GPS however, and no WiFi.

While walking yesterday I thought about the cams of the (near) future. Interchangeable lenses will most likely vanish – they have so many drawbacks. Maybe there'll be nearly identical cameras in specialized models, as there once were wide-angle Rolleis and tele-Rolleis. But for most purposes one zoom could handle everything. Also it's clear that a good EVF will replace optical finders, something we've both already concluded. And I guess storage cards will go the way of film; realtime transmission of captured images to a remote (safe) location seems a better choice.

Folks haven't yet understood that we're only at the threshold of information tech. If you can see it and point to the "computer," it's primitive. Soon it will vanish into the woodwork and everybody will grow up assuming it's always been there. "You mean you had a car that you had to drive yourself, all the time? Weren't there lots of crashes? What did they do, I mean what did you do, when you got to an intersection? You had to watch for a light to change? And it didn't let you go even if there were no other cars coming? I don't believe you."

Thanksgiving Conundrum

A note to my friend Fiertel. Chris and I have a niece and her three-year-old son visiting for Thanksgiving.

Made a couple of snapshots of the sub-nephew. They were much appreciated. Also my photos of folks at the office were received with embarrassing praise. This raises a question that's vexed me for years. It sounds like false modesty or fishing for compliments, but I promise it's not. Why is it that if you or I make a photo of somebody, or of a hunk of scenery, or of an objet d'art like for a catalog, viewers are generally full of approbation – yet all we do, or anyway all I do, is point the camera and snap the shutter, trying of course to choose good lighting and the right aperture. Seems to me anybody could do that, especially now that cameras focus themselves and set their own exposure and such. Yet there must be something else involved, because when most perfectly intelligent, art-sensitive people get hold of a good camera and try to do what we do, they can't. I just don't understand. I mean, I can dig why it is that I write better prose or poetry than most folks – they just don't seem to have the right muscles in their head. But in photography I know I'm not all that shit hot, and yet... What the hell?

"Oddly, I like this image"

David J. Sullivan, one of my best critics, posted a note to a sui generis still life: "Oddly, I find I like this image, with the exit out of the top of the frame, better than the next one which has everything contained." I can't think of anything I'd rather hear than "Oddly, I like this image." My answer to him follows.

Many thanks. You're on the money, as usual – at least my two cents' worth. I've come to think of my best photos as "hard pictures," hard in various ways, one way being that it's hard to tell them from mistakes. When I put them on photo.net they get little attention and low ratings. I'm not complaining.

Vade Mecum

After a good deal of research I bought two Canon S80's, one for me and one for Chris. Today I took mine to Harriman Park and spent a few hours snapping away. It's got to be one of the least likely landscape cameras, which adds to the fun of using it that way. Did a surprisingly good job. There's some corner softness and distortion at its widest-angle setting (28mm equivalent), and no raw mode, but so far (two days usage) I don't have any other complaints. I got it as a walk-around, always-with-me vade mecum.