Canon PowerShot S80

Image quality
While some minor problems at the camera's wide-angle setting disappointed us, the Canon PowerShot S80 delivers excellent overall photo quality. Colours are well balanced, with a tiny bit of pop, and you can tone them down or give them that Disney look with a plethora of custom colour controls, including one called Neutral and another that emulates slides. Images exhibit excellent tonal range, with clear details visible in both shadow and highlight areas, as long as the difference isn't too extreme.

When we closely inspected the image at 100 per cent magnification, we saw chromatic aberration, colour artefacts usually caused by heavy backlighting or high-contrast environments. The casual observer will find the effect minimal, though. Shots of power lines and trees against a bright sky showed very little fringing or colour bleeding. Though we would have liked to see how this sensor performs with an uncompressed image format, JPEG compression artefacts such as blocky colour areas, jagged diagonal lines and halo effects in high-contrast areas were also minimal.

Canon's legendary creamy smoothness keeps noise under control. The S80's images sharpen well in image-editing software and look especially pleasing at ISO 50. ISO 100 shots are almost as noise-free at a casual glance, but the dreaded artefacts rear their ugly pixels more noticeably at ISO 200 and 400. The noise pattern is one of the more natural ones, however, giving images a diffuse, filmlike look. The inherently sharp lens-and-sensor combination on the S80 clearly resolves text and fine details in macro images.

The 28mm-to-100mm lens has some problems at the wide end, particularly with softness at the corners and vignetting, in which corners appear darker than the rest of the frame. This happens even when the aperture is stopped down to f/8, which usually minimises or eliminates the problem. We also noticed some barrel distortion at the wide end. All these problems may be a result of the lens reaching the relatively wide 28mm length in a compact enclosure. Zooming to the middle or the end of the lens's range significantly helps the softness and the vignetting and adds a barely distinguishable pincushion effect that's normal for all zooms. Except for the vignetting, most of these effects are hard to spot in real-world snapshots.

The S80's very intelligent metering system even employs the orientation sensor in its exposure algorithms. It properly exposed the backlit foreground in both horizontal and vertical landscapes shot with a bright sky.

The S80's movie mode is slightly disappointing, despite its impressive high-res specs. In movies shot at 1,024x768-pixel resolution, which are limited to 15fps, just about every line appeared jagged. We got better results by upsampling a 30fps, 640x480-pixel movie in software.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide

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