Reviews for Canon PowerShot S2 IS 5 Megapixel Compact Camera - Silver

this camera r0xers~!

this is excellent

I agree the power requirements are substantial, but with rechargable batteries you can limit the cost.

One major problme I encountered was that I purchased 3 units to get to one that worked out of the factory sealed box. The digitization was poor in some cases none existant. Canon has been less than helpful in resolution of the issue. I have received numebrous emails stating someone would call but still have not receieved the call. They are leaving the customer service issue with the retail establishment. To me that is truly poor form.

Now that I have the 4th unit, it is a dream to use. Very crisp and clear pitures, effortless downloading to my computer.

Very nice and well thought out Camera. Hope it lasts as well. The first 3 units must have been from the same lot.

Thanks

My husband just purchased this camera for me. I had a hard time choosing between a sony,olympus and the canon. What I would like to know is what you are referring to as units, and what you mean by them.
Thanks

From context, I believe the reviewer means one of these cameras itself (bought new in factory sealed box) as a "unit".

I just want to know if I can avoid store bought alkaline batteries and use a rechargeable batterie for this particular unit. My previous Canons all use rechargable batteries, and I find those to be the best and most convenient.

Thank you very much for sharing the information. I would like to know one more thing about this model is if it's capable of doing Photo Date/Time Stamping. I want to buy this camera for my mother and she insists that any camera I buy for her must have this option. Thanks for sharing.

Comparing it with the Sony DSC H1, would you go for Canon?
Thanks
Alberto

My dealings with my Canon Powershot is outstanding. On our recent trip we took over 800 pictures and was able to "voice print" all of these. This the best feature to remind us where it was taken, what it's all about and any other identification a person might need. We absolutly love this camera. We plan on purchasing the wide-angle and telephoto lens that can be used with this camera. Again a beautiful camera.

I too have this camera and love it! I am having a bit of a problem with some pictures being "fuzzy". Why? If they aren't "fuzzy" they are amazingly crisp and clear. Fantastic. Why are some fuzzy?

RE: Lens Cap; Buy the conversion lens adapter and screw on a clear UV filter, which serves to protect the lens and you'll no longer need the lens cap. Canon's design of the lens cap was excellent; it prevents damage to the zoom motor for those who forget to remove it before turning the power on. The lens cap ease of falling off has been a common complaint, which I feel is unwarranted and believe it to be by design.

Regarding the lens cap issue I agree with canons philosophy of (trying) to protect the zoom motor from extending accidently whilst a fixed lens cap is in place.
But for those like me who will take a risk you can glue the cap to the small lens adapter cover frame (only use a few drops of glue eg superglue on the front of the adapter cover then carefully line up cap "so that CANON is Horizontal" and press down to set glue)then to remove the cap you hold down the chrome cover release (between handgrip and bottom of lens housing) whilst rotating the cap anticlockwise... becomes very natural after the first go

Hope this helps

PS if you are afraid of "supergluing" the cap try two small drops of a silicon sealer to achieve same result you can then remove this later if you need by rubbing the silicon off after gently prying the two pieces apart

Lens cap issue:
I have read so much negative about the lens cap that I will share my experience.
I have attached the lens cap to the strap holder on the camera. The lens cap pops off but stays attached to the camera.
The reason the cap is made this way is that when you turn the camera on, the lens zooms out. If the lens cap was on tight, it would impede the lens motor and possibly cause damage.
With my setup , it works like a charm. If I turn it on, the lens cap just falls off like it is supposed to and dangles on the side.

I have no problem with this arrangement...

No point in paying Canon to fix what should have been done right from the start. (Did they not test the lens cap at all?)

Instead, waste no time and buy a conversion lens adapter from either Canon or preferably the 52mm adapter from Lensmate. Then put on a $15 UV filter to protect that $400+ camera! Now with metal protecting that powerful zoom and easy to replace glass protecting that very big lens, you can now pay another $5 and get a lens cap that clips securely into place.

Yes, you're looking at about $50 total in addition to what you paid for the camera, but the peace of mind this small investment makes is immeasurable!

I concur, buy the conversion lens adapter and screw on a clear UV filter, which serves to protect the lens and you'll no longer need the lens cap. Canon's design of the lens cap was excellent; it prevents damage to the zoom motor for those who forget to remove it before turning the power on. The lens cap ease of falling off has been a common complaint, which I feel is unwarranted. I believe it was by design.

Please do not type in all caps. It makes things very hard to read and looks like you are shouting.

Reply by member: groucho121
Jan 1, 2006

If anyone would be so kind who owns one of these: Does the auto focus in "auto mode" work similar to the A600 & A500 models,where you depress the shutter 1/2 way and it auto focuses?

I need to buy a camera I can hand to a friend/co-worker and just tell them to do a few simple things to get a decent 4X6 pic, or one to publish in an ebay ad???



Thanks for any replies!

whoo-hoo!

Here is a permanent cure to your loose cap: Tape a .5 inch by .25 inch black tape on the inner lip of the cap. Trim off any tape over lapping lip. It will never drop off. In fact, you are more apt to forget to take the cap off when you switch the camera on at which point you will wonder why the camera does not turn on until you realize you still have the cap on.

Good shots!!!!

Christian

How is the shutter lag speed? Comparing to the Panasonic FZ5.

I talked to canon and tried to find out the lag time on the shutter and they told me that
information is not published. That is the only item that has kept me from buying this
camera

David

I Talked to canon again and they told me all digital camera had shutter lag timed do to the auto focusing. If you hold the button half down until your shot come up it clicks within a fraction of a second.

David

Hi, I have had this camera since Xmas and I am still learning how to use it. Love it so far. However, I haven't had much luck with getting my daughter's basketball pictures to turn out good. I see the settings you mention using and that is great. But can I save those settings once I make them for future use?

Thanks
Candi

I have had this unit for nearly 3 months and could not be more disappointed in a leading name mfr.

CANON offers little help in assisting new users, I have been using SONY for years and do not know why I changed but I did and now suffering the pain.

My main interest is action sport shots and this camera does not allow for this type of action shots, unless, I am reading the wrong manual.

The only consistent thing in my results is the inconsistency.

NEVER AGAIN will I purchase from a recommended vendor, once the sale is made it is "see you later' I have tried to e-mail and call Butterfly Photo several times [ 13 ] without the courtesy of a response, including telephone messages.

Anyone interested in a new S2 I2 ??? I'm going back to SONY.

How do you take action shots during a hockey game? Would like to hear your recommendations.

Action shot cameras are just about the hardest shots for a non-pro because of the lighting and high speed action.

I am not a pro, but here's my guess:
- max speed to be used: 1/60 sec
- max iso to be used: 100

sit close to action; use burst mode, and minimize the shaking with the free hand

hockey shots are way more difficult (than say, basketball or football) because of the problem of the addition of reflected light

if you can, set the camera on the ground, pointing slightly upwards to minimize the reflection

and oh yeah...if you do try, don't forget to thank/abuse

I've been looking for digital cameras that will take good quality action shots for my lacrosse, tennis and surf teams. The first person seemed to really like it for its action shots, everyone else is saying its not so good. Would you reccomend this camera for sport photos?

Action shooting can be difficult but comes down to max-ing your shutter speed ....
Set ISO as high as tollerable (eg check for noise at iso 400), use low to medium f-stop (its a compromise between light gathering and depth of field) and then set fastest possible shutter speed.
Use manual settings, and first try some test shots of nearby stationary subjects to get your exposure right, then go for the action with settings fixed.
Try manual focus to eliminate the auto-focussing delay, but be careful to set it up on subjects at the right distance (do this at the same time as you set your exposure).
Don't expect very good results in low light.
Try to pan with the action (this takes practice, the pro's can do this instinctively).
Use continuous shooting mode so you get to choose the best of 5 or 6 shots.
Sometimes in low light you can improve results by adding some flash to "fill" or supplement the natural light.
That's basically it. Its one of the hardest things you can try to do with a compact digicam, so don't be disappointed if good results take a bit of practice, and don't blame the camera !!
Any digital SLR's will beat the S2 at this game, as they have fundamentally more sensitive CCD's, but the S2 is a reasonable performer and probably the best for action shots of the pro-sumer superzooms.

Good luck!

A wide aperture could help & give you a quality picture rather than power consuming flash. Manufacturer must improve more on the aperture & ISO equivalencies. However client should sacrifice a bit of the price.

...it does not matter if you use the extra pixels or not in terms of file settings, a higher-resolution camera with a bigger sensor or at least a greater number of pixels on the same-size sensor, will give you a more natural-looking photo. The extra pixel information helps to improve the image processing.

That is, I think, why the sp500 images look more natural than the s2 or the dmc-fz5s (especially with high-fidelity images)...and why the sp-310 is better yet. All of the high-zoom cameras listed have 1/2.5" ccds (with either 5 or 6MP) and the sp-310 has a 1/1.8" 7MP ccd. That's why the new DLSRs have 2.5" CCDs...and 10-15MP.

Plus, really, get a 16:9 if not a 3:2 option if you can. They really come in handy on wide-angle shots. I would think that the s3 would be better than the s2 for these reasons...but, if you're going to buy the s3 for these reasons, you're buying the wrong camera in the first place. Still it would be better than an S2 for these reasons :) plus it has a bigger screen and live histogram.

And of course the grey color! So you don't look like *such* a geek...

but, honestly, that 12x zoom comes in real handy. But only for shooting at small things that are far away. I've found an 8x zoom to be insufficient even for shooting animals in a park, but, really, I rarely use the full 12x zoom unless I'm shooting across a bay or something. Then it's often not *enough* zoom :)

...enough zoom to get you into trouble, but not enough to really satisfy all your needs for zoom.

It's a midrange camera. Not enough pixels, not enough zoom, not enough ISO, too much noise at ISO400, too much weight, costs too much. Not a DSLR and not a pocket point and shoot. And definitely not the hottest thing since sliced bread. But I can see if I had an EOS or a Nikon mid-range DSLR, at $1000 plus another $250 per lens, I'd be comfortable with carrying one of these for general use. But wouldn't a real pocket point and shoot be even better?

...if you must have one of these, wait until they hit $200 or less. Just give it a few more months. Anything will be under $200 if you wait long enough.

Please forgive me for qualifying all of my comments, such:

a little more noise (10% or so, from a sensor of the same size with more MP) is worth the extra resolution, but the camera has to have the lens and the image processing to take advantage of it. A slow, cheap lens and crappy image processing will defeat even a nice 1/1.7" high-MP clean sensor. Typical flaws are a lot of purple fringing and highlights on bright/white areas of the photo, and a low depth of field due to a large aperture. The good thing about this camera is that it is large and heavy therefore steady and it has a large and fast lens.

It takes sharp photos, clean photos, sharper and cleaner than you can probably get from any point and shoot. The colors are a bit too white/bright for my taste, but, overall, the shots look good. Definitely good image quality. And, really, it is only about twice the weight and size of an A700-A540 style Canon. It's major disadvantage is that it does not have multi-point/matrix focusing (I think even the A700 has that, now). It will focus on low-contrast objects in very low light. It has to, that's the only type of focus it gives you.

I plan to get an A700 and compare it, perhaps even an Olympus sp-320 or 350, maybe a Fuji A600 too, and really test them and see what is what. I tried a Panasonic dmc-tz1 and that was pretty-much a disaster.

I might even get an s3 for the same reasons. I'm very curious about it, too.

I know exactly what I am looking for in terms of test shots and I will post some shots here, later. But, my main considerations are:

1) good evaluative metering, so that if I take a shot on a cloudy day the subject doesn't come out dark. Also if taken on a bright day, all the whites are white not purple/white with haze, from overexposure, likewise the reflective surfaces.

2) I'd like to see good image fidelity when taking shots of buildings with lots of glass windows and so forth, wide-angle. Both color and spatial fidelity. Solid brick or stone buildings are easy. Large transitions in color combined with angles and lines are a problem, generally, with small pocket point and shoots.


3) the camera should be clean and fast and focus well in any conditions that I want to shoot in. Especially when it is light enough to shoot handheld.

Generally the S2 meets all these conditions though the f5z shoots a little faster, in low light. The one thing I would ask of it, image-wise, is a little more fidelity in the images. It just seems to boost whites too much. Everything has a pinkish/whitish tint in overcast conditions and the whites are very white. Supposedly this has been fixed in the S3.

Along with the one real problem I have with this camera, that the ISO indication is just too small. Just barely big enough to see. In the S3 there is a big message that is flashed on the screen/viewfinder when the ISO is changed.

7/3/06 minor update :)

O.k. I've had my camera for at least 3 months now...I've checked the s3 in the store many times, taking shots with my s2 under a lot of different conditions. Trying to keep this short :)

I don't think the s3 has anything on the s2, really, other than the color. If I could get it in black I would, definitely. The ISO button, you can set the user-selectable function to ISO, the small indicator, you can get around that by using the function button and then there is no doubt about what the ISO is.

This camera is a pretty sharp camera, in terms of image fidelity...sharper than my fz5, definitely...

What would I change on it? I would move the viewfinder to the left, make the screen better and bigger (not 1/8th of an inch bigger, with the same # of pixels)...I'd make the whole camera wider but probably the same height...give it the ability to shoot 16:9 and 3:2 as well as 4:3 in all modes..and it also needs to have multi-point focusing. That is where it is showing its age.

With this camera you cannot just point it at a scene and take a photo, reliably, which you could do if it had mulipoint focusing (which the a700 has, and I'm expecting more from the A7xx when they come out). But IMAGE_WISE it is the sharpest camera that I have. IF it focuses for you, either where you point it or you don't mind playing around with the manual focus to lock the focus and then reframing your shot to get the proper exposure, it will give you a GREAT image.

under just about any conditions, for just about any shot.

For that reason I would keep it if you have an s2 already, or buy one if you can deal with the size and weight. I don't think the s3 will give you anything on this camera. It's almost exactly the same.

one important thing :)

don't even bother with superfine mode. The Q on that is somewhere north of 95 (I could not duplicate it with Lview as the most it will use is 95), resulting in a mere 5:1 compression ratio over a tiff file of the same resolution, and giving you a file that is visually indistinguishable from the fine mode file. The fine mode has a Q between 90 and 95, way more than high enough, you will see absolutely no difference between that and a tiff file. Compression there is about 10:1. Low-res is about 75, which is also, more than necessary for almost all shots, and gives you a 20:1 compression over a tiff file at the same image resolution.

I looked at this closely, to even see any visual distortion in a jpeg file, you have to take the Q down into the low 60s. And you have to look hard to see it, even then.

It could easily go down to the mid to upper 60s, with a compression ratio of over 25:1 and still be ok for casual shooting. I will probably never shoot superfine again, and fine is overkill, I am sure.

(note this is relative to a tiff file of the same shot, really, tiff doesn't care about the shot, just the number of pixels...at 24 bits per pixel, 2MP format (1600x1200) will give you a 6MB (actually 5.5MB) tiff file. You can work from this info to find the Q, approximately, for your favorite camera :)

um, a big discovery...

I was double-checking on the multipoint exposure issue and I discovered that the s2 has a "user-settable focus point" mode, that you enter through the "set" button...

this works really, really well.

It's like a manual multi-point focus.

Almost totally makes up for not having an automatic multipoint focus mode, since you don't have to trust the camera to pick a good focus point.

Plus -plus!- the focus point does not reset after taking a photo. This is huge.

So, this camera, as it sits, has two flaws. The fact that you have to either set the shooting mode (the "drive": single-shot, multi-shot, timer) each time you turn it on, or set it up in custom mode. All I ask is that the camera keep the same settings when I turn it off and back on. Nothing major, that's it.

But this is o.k. since it does have a dedicated drive button.

Second there's no way the colors are as accurate as a Nikon or Olympus. They're not bad. They're o.k. But not entirely accurate. And ISO400 is too noisy to use except when absolutely necessary. But the other ISOs are clean and the camera is really good, in general. I have to give it a solid 9 out of 10, overall.

s2, fz5 and sp-500 at full zoom, program, highest resolution mode.

cropped to 640x480 to fit this system :)

oops, at iso100, handheld, no IS.

...you know, the s2 really could use alignment lines, the big flashing message when you use a hypothetical dedicated ISO button, and the cool dark gray color...like the s3 :)

It also could use a switch to turn off the NR, instead of automatically turning it on when the shutter speed goes over 1.3s. This is a major mistake.

And it would be so much better if the drive would stay the same when I turn it off and back on.

...one thing I've heard that worries me is supposedly the lens is not all that sharp above f5.6. But it's damm sharp at F5.6.

...I took *both* my s2 and my fz5 up to Manhattan today :) Part 2 of a two-parter, one to compare an a700 to an s4, the other to compare the s2 to the fz5, shooting in and around Manhattan. I knew the s2 would be sharper but I wanted to see how much of a factor the 9-point multi-area focus plus the lighter speed and handling of the fz5 was compared to the limited area adjustment of the focus point plus the heavier weight and bulk of the s2 plus the goofy lenscap was in terms of shooting in and around Manhattan. I knew that both were reasonably competent when shooting around DC or up at the Inner Harbor.

I would have to say that all the weaknesses of the fz5, image-wise, came out today. Not high-resolution in terms of color at the pixel level, certainly that came out when shooting across the Hudson at high zoom, even on wide-angle street shots there was the usual fz5 blotchiness...and it, surprisingly, had more than a little trouble handling high-contrast shots, routinely underexposing them (the fz5 tries to correct the exposure as well as adjust the shooting parameters, and that's a bad thing to do when shooting high-contrast shots). It did reasonably well with shots with a limited contrast, where pixel-level color accuracy was not required. Still, overall, the s2 put the wood to it. When both were pushed hard, even given the limitations of the focus point, the s2 simply gave good shots while fz5 fell down many times in many ways. The s2 is simply sharper, the colors are cleaner at the pixel level, and it has better metering. The fz5 is still good for shooting *down* or away from the sun (so there is not a lot of sunny sky, the buildings are brighter and therefore there is not so much contrast)...keep the sun out of the shot and don't expect too much color accuracy at the pixel level.

...no doubt the fz5 is easier to handle than the s2, and definitely shoots faster, but it's really handicapped by its inability to handle high contrast as well as the s2 does. At least shooting program or Aperture-priority mode.

....please take that last comment with a grain of salt as the per-pixel color accuracy depends a LOT on the Q setting used for the jpeg file.

The fz5 is not a lot worse than the s2 in terms of pixel-level resolution. It's definitely blotchier/more watercolory than the s2. But basically they have the same resolution. The big difference is that the images on the s2 are sharper, and can be sharpened in-camera without adding color noise as the fz5 is very limited in terms of image adjustment and to sharpen the images with vivid instead of standard, that also increases color noise...and that any color noise in the fz5 is obvious compared to the s2, which really does not have any noticable color noise as far as I can tell, while the fz5 is definitely "watercolory". But its biggest problem is that the exposure will "dance". If you shoot at night, the fz5 will try to brighten things up by changing the exposure, if you shoot in bright daylight or high-contrast shots it will darken the shot for you by changing the exposure. It should just change the shutter speed and aperture like the s2 does (assuming that you are using a program mode). But, no...plus, the s2 has more light types for light-matching, the fz5 could use a few more. Shoot the fz5 within its limits and it will give you good shots that you can sharpen if you like. Shoot the s2 within its wider limits and it will give you great shots.

...one more grain of salt :)

Today I was looking for the shots that, last night, were giving me so much worry about the fz5 in terms of its ability to handle high-contrast shots, and gee, half of them were a700 shots.

I was very tired and probably dehydrated too when I wrote those comments last night :)

Anyway, first of all, shooting in the concrete canyons of Manhattan is a tough test for a camera, especially in terms of exposure, and handling high contrast. Some sineh filtering is required to lighten the shots no matter which camera I used, especially shooting towards the sun in really narrow streets, under trees, wherever there was a lot of shade and a bright sky. However still the fz5 has a little more color noise and less sharpness than the s2. The fz5 is just not as flexible as the s2 in terms of setup, but it is a light, fast and easy camera to use, with a good fast lens. It will not give you the sharpest, best-looking shots (hey, after all it is a 5MP 1/2.5" CCD camera) but it will give decent shots that you can work with, with fairly low noise for a non SuperCCD sensor and decent color accuracy and image resolution. Not as good as the s2, but not bad.

...for sure, I am running a sineh filter, to lighten the exposure and bring out dark detail without crunching the highlights, as well as an edge filter to sharpen, on just about all the wide-angle shots that I took in Manhattan in the mid to late afternoon when the sun was hidden by the buildings but the sky was still bright. For the a700, the fz5, and the s2 too.
I just somehow got confused about that when I got back and lost track of which files were from which camera :)
But still, the fz5 is slightly more watercolory and less sharp than either the a700 or s2, especially when the sharpness is up and the saturation down on the two Canons. You can diddle with the Q setting, the jpeg resolution setting, and try to reduce the color noise. But it isn't going to go away entirely, in the fz5. It is not a huge big hairy deal. But you will notice it if you look for it. So I suppose there really is not all that much difference, photographically, between the three cameras, given the slight sharpness advantage of the Canons...but there certainly is a difference in terms of ease of use, speed, weight, and features. The fz5 has the low weight advantage and even more user-friendliness than the a700, with the big zoom and good noise and low-light performance of the s2. The Canons' main advantage is having slightly less color noise than the fz5, and slightly cleaner, crisper shots. The a700s advantage is really the light weight and small size which leads to easy handling. Again I would say that unless you really need a 12x zoom camera, or something with a flip-and twist LCD, the a700 is the way to go. When choosing directly between the fz5 and s2 you really have to choose between the user-friendliness and light weight of the fz5 and the "gold standard" of crisp shots from the s2. 99% of the time the image will look pretty-much the same and the fz5 would be the better carry due to its much faster shooting speed and lighter weight, multipoint AF and secure lenscap. There'll be that 1% where the s2 will clearly beat the fz5, usually at high zoom where there is a lot of color range and fine detail in the shot and pixel-level color accuracy counts for a lot, plus the true manual control allowing you to change the camera settings much more quickly on the s2 instead of resorting to leaving the fz5 in a program mode (or setting up a shutter speed in S mode and an aperture in A mode and switching between the two when P is not good enough). And that is why I would carry the a700 *and* either the fz5 or s2, depending on what you care about most.

One other thing, in night shooting under streetlighs or lamps, the s2 will give you a nice bluish color, the fz5 will shoot with a brownish "halogen" tint.

...ah, well. I just returned the a700 and ordered another brand-new sp-500 as the one I sold to Adorama in NYC has already been sold, ironically for what they cost new....twice what they gave me for mine, which was in as-new condition. A quick $125 lesson.

I figured out why the images on this camera came out looking so much more "photographic" than the images on my other cameras, except maybe for the a345 which also has great color.

it's not in the *color* balance.

It's in the linear resolution and the highlighting.

This camera has significantly more pixel per inch resolution and much better highlighting than the s2/a700, the fz5, certainly more than the s4, not even to mention the TZ1. It's sort of all how things come together, as certainly it's only a 6MP camera. But...I can post crops to show where it is a clear winner vs the s2 and the fz5, and where the s2 beats the sp500. I didn't really figure this all out until I got the a700 and started to shoot it at 6MP. And then it all became, er, clear. Actually muddy, grainy and unclear is more accurate.

This is easy to explain but pictures will demonstrate it better, and I will post at least one here with this. It really all comes down to how closely you look at the photos. The jpeg quality helps to affect the color accuracy and the image resolution but only up to a point, up to a Q of about 68-78, above that it is really hard to distinguish any benefit from a higher Q (and certainly from shooting TIFF vs jpeg with the fz5). But if the camera basically does not have the resolution and image processing that is necessary to give a good shot, then no change in "image quality" settings will provide it. It's like putting makeup on a pig, it's only going to make the pig look more made up. It'll make the images 50%, 100% larger but hardly any better looking unless you know what to look for.

And what you want to look for (and not see) are two things. "Artifacts" and a lack of resolution. You don't want to see blurs from oversharpening or oversaturation, and you don't want to see blurs and grainess from a lack of resolution and just outright poor image-processing on top of a poor sensor. This is where the Olympus sp500 and sp310/320/350 have the others beat hands down. It has a middling 1/1.7"(1/2.5" CCD with the sp500) square-pixel CCD but they work wonders with that sensor. Whereas the other cameras either don't do all that much to it other than oversaturate the image (TZ1, s4), or they do a decent but not all that great job of image processing, enough to give a good looking photo if you don't look too closely, but if you do you'll see lots of graininess, blurring, loss of detail...even some color noise. But the a700 and s2 make up for that in terms of being very powerful and easy to use cameras, in terms of features. The fz5 even more so. But they definitely do not take great PHOTOS. Out of all that I have mentioned, only the Olympus cameras are going to do that, and even then they need a lot of light to get it right. But in good light they will simply kick butt over an S2 or fz5, not to mention an a700, not *even* to mention an s4 or tz1.

I tried a fuji F650 this weekend, with a 1/2.5" square CCD sensor...it basically the same as the s4 imagewise with the benefit of at least *some* shooting information...actually the Fuji a600, with the 1/1.7" superCCD sensor, takes better-looking shots. I just wish it had multi-area focusing. It doesn't show the shooting info but that's ok under most light it's just fine and even I just set it to ISO400 after dusk and it was really nice and clean. Handshake limited, obviously, but otherwise quite decent.

But back to the point at hand. Again, the key is to shoot at the highest resolution and get right down with the images and see what you see. You've got to distinguish between blurring from handshaking, bad focus and a moving target, from blurring and graininess from the camera itself. Actually it's not all that hard once you have seen enough photos from enough cameras with different sensors and image processing, and it is much easier if you look at phots taken at the highest resolution that the camera will produce. Then the basic flaws of the camera leap right out at you..while when shooting at 1MP or 640x480 the image flaws tend to come from the low Jpeg Q and the downsampling required to produce the images. I will try to point out the difference visually. Now, 640x480 crops from all that I can find.

Still, it is a real shame that this camera only had a 1-year run, because it is far and away the best imaging camera that I have had (and will have again)...but it didn't sell well because of the flakiness of the camera, itself. It is definitely not as easy to shoot as an s2, and certainly not as convenient to carry as an fz5. But at this point, it is the only camera I really want to shoot. I'm sick and tired of looking at bad-looking images from these cameras, cameras that only look good when shooting tight or I'm sitting far back from the image.

Basically I'm suffering from image-reviewing overload :) from now I'm going to try to post photos, not so much text. Gotta explain, though.I've gotten to the point where even with a 2MP image I can see if what I don't want to see is there, and point it out...or, what I do want to see. My goal here, now is to do just that. But you should follow along with your own camera. Take your favorite pics and look at them in native resolution on your screen. Not downsampled to fit the screen, at least as a start. Eventually you'll be able to see what I'm talking about as your eye will be trained. These are what limit your camera from producing "photograhs". Instead of just "pictures".

...ah, well. I just returned the a700 and ordered another brand-new sp-500 as the one I sold to Adorama in NYC has already been sold, ironically for what they cost new....twice what they gave me for mine, which was in as-new condition. A quick $125 lesson.

I figured out why the images on this camera came out looking so much more "photographic" than the images on my other cameras, except maybe for the a345 which also has great color.

it's not in the *color* balance.

It's in the linear resolution and the highlighting.

This camera has significantly more pixel per inch resolution and much better highlighting than the s2/a700, the fz5, certainly more than the s4, not even to mention the TZ1. It's sort of all how things come together, as certainly it's only a 6MP camera. But...I can post crops to show where it is a clear winner vs the s2 and the fz5, and where the s2 beats the sp500. I didn't really figure this all out until I got the a700 and started to shoot it at 6MP. And then it all became, er, clear. Actually muddy, grainy and unclear is more accurate.

This is easy to explain but pictures will demonstrate it better, and I will post at least one here with this. It really all comes down to how closely you look at the photos. The jpeg quality helps to affect the color accuracy and the image resolution but only up to a point, up to a Q of about 68-78, above that it is really hard to distinguish any benefit from a higher Q (and certainly from shooting TIFF vs jpeg with the fz5). But if the camera basically does not have the resolution and image processing that is necessary to give a good shot, then no change in "image quality" settings will provide it. It's like putting makeup on a pig, it's only going to make the pig look more made up. It'll make the images 50%, 100% larger but hardly any better looking unless you know what to look for.

And what you want to look for (and not see) are two things. "Artifacts" and a lack of resolution. You don't want to see blurs from oversharpening or oversaturation, and you don't want to see blurs and grainess from a lack of resolution and just outright poor image-processing on top of a poor sensor. This is where the Olympus sp500 and sp310/320/350 have the others beat hands down. It has a middling 1/1.7"(1/2.5" CCD with the sp500) square-pixel CCD but they work wonders with that sensor. Whereas the other cameras either don't do all that much to it other than oversaturate the image (TZ1, s4), or they do a decent but not all that great job of image processing, enough to give a good looking photo if you don't look too closely, but if you do you'll see lots of graininess, blurring, loss of detail...even some color noise. But the a700 and s2 make up for that in terms of being very powerful and easy to use cameras, in terms of features. The fz5 even more so. But they definitely do not take great PHOTOS. Out of all that I have mentioned, only the Olympus cameras are going to do that, and even then they need a lot of light to get it right. But in good light they will simply kick butt over an S2 or fz5, not to mention an a700, not *even* to mention an s4 or tz1.

I tried a fuji F650 this weekend, with a 1/2.5" square CCD sensor...it basically the same as the s4 imagewise with the benefit of at least *some* shooting information...actually the Fuji a600, with the 1/1.7" superCCD sensor, takes better-looking shots. I just wish it had multi-area focusing. It doesn't show the shooting info but that's ok under most light it's just fine and even I just set it to ISO400 after dusk and it was really nice and clean. Handshake limited, obviously, but otherwise quite decent.

But back to the point at hand. Again, the key is to shoot at the highest resolution and get right down with the images and see what you see. You've got to distinguish between blurring from handshaking, bad focus and a moving target, from blurring and graininess from the camera itself. Actually it's not all that hard once you have seen enough photos from enough cameras with different sensors and image processing, and it is much easier if you look at phots taken at the highest resolution that the camera will produce. Then the basic flaws of the camera leap right out at you..while when shooting at 1MP or 640x480 the image flaws tend to come from the low Jpeg Q and the downsampling required to produce the images. I will try to point out the difference visually. Now, 640x480 crops from all that I can find.

Still, it is a real shame that this camera only had a 1-year run, because it is far and away the best imaging camera that I have had (and will have again)...but it didn't sell well because of the flakiness of the camera, itself. It is definitely not as easy to shoot as an s2, and certainly not as convenient to carry as an fz5. But at this point, it is the only camera I really want to shoot. I'm sick and tired of looking at bad-looking images from these cameras, cameras that only look good when shooting tight or I'm sitting far back from the image.

Basically I'm suffering from image-reviewing overload :) from now I'm going to try to post photos, not so much text. Gotta explain, though.I've gotten to the point where even with a 2MP image I can see if what I don't want to see is there, and point it out...or, what I do want to see. My goal here, now is to do just that. But you should follow along with your own camera. Take your favorite pics and look at them in native resolution on your screen. Not downsampled to fit the screen, at least as a start. Eventually you'll be able to see what I'm talking about as your eye will be trained. These are what limit your camera from producing "photograhs". Instead of just "pictures".

(don't hit "submit" twice).

anyway. I will not put down the s2 without posting a shot to explain.

This shot is 1/800 f5.0 ISO50, 72mm full zoom.

In this shot you will see both the strengths and weakness of the s2 from an image-quality standpoint. It is a zoom shot taken out over the Baltimore Inner harbor in what is clearly not all that great light. Notice that everything is in focus, and all the colors look reasonable, controlled, there is good contrast and nothing too bright or "flaring", and there seems to be a reasonable degree of resolution.

The other side of that coin, the empty part of the glass, is that the resolution is not all that high, certainly not impressive much less "photographic". Look over to the right, where the balconies are, vertically...there's no detail there, the guardrails are just a black blur. There are no textures on anything, anywhere. The windows are flat and black, with no reflections in them, the posts supporting the pier have no texture, all the colors are pastel, the surfaces solid and smooth, and the trees to the left, can you see any actual "branches", or just a tumble of brown string-like objects? The s2 is really bad with bushes and long grass, stuff like that, things that are brownish and have texture. It destroys all the texture...which in some cases is good for the shot, like a high-contrast setting looks good sometimes, for clarity...and in some cases it's very bad. In no case is it "photographic". It took me a while to figure out what was going on with that, I thought it was a lens problem but no, the camera just does not have enough image resolution for that sort of work. I don't mean "pixel resolution"...I mean that it elminates all the fine detail. And the photos all come out looking flat.

It looks *clean*, but *flat*. And trust me this camera is really disappointing in that way. I spent $400 to get this big heavy highly-regarded camera that operates well and takes images that are well-focused and clean and all, and I looked at them and just said, "eh." I was quite deflated. I would chalk it up in this case to too much noise-reduction, causing way too much detail to be washed out of the shot. But when you want to get a good focus in low light this camera is hard to beat (but the fz5 is even better in low light because the image stabilization is more effective and it has a faster lens). And if I was really close to the subject (or I had zoomed tigher) it would be hard to notice all those flaws. Most big-zoom midrange cameras mask their image quality flaws when the user zooms in tight on the shot.

Now the A700 is a lot like this but not quite as good as the s2. It really is not a bad camera. It's just not a good camera. From the dpreview.com sample images I see the same problem, and the s3 probably has the same sensor as the a700...and the same image-processing. This is not the camera that I want to take photographs with. It might be a good "documentation tool" but not good for photography. And I already have an fz5 which is great for that, and is more easy to carry around than the s2. I do give the s2 credit, it does a good job of controlling color, better than the fz5. But in terms of image quality, the sp500 is much better...except for one thing...the s2 handles bright reflections, white surfaces and so forth, better than the sp500 :) ...even though the sp500 does not flare or purple-fringe like the s2 does. It does seem to have too much contrast and/or saturation to shoot clean in bright light. At least at the default settings and I will be looking into this closely when I get my new sp500 (yes, I have bought a new sp500 for the FOURTH TIME).

In some ways it helps not to be able to return a camera. I bought my s2 on ebay for $375 from some guy who was upgrading to a DSLR, back when the s2 was $500 retail. For many months I regretted that decision. It has been the only camera that I have bought in the past 7 months, that I have not been able to return for at least 85% of what I paid for it. And it will be the last time I buy anything that I cannot return.

...I mean, really, it's not a bad camera, sure, it's powerful, but really it's not all that great, either. I would not consciously pay more than $250 for one, knowing it as well as I do now. And that's one big reason that I have not sold mine on ebay yet. I don't expect to get anything much for it, especially when you can buy a new one for $250 now. I'D MUCH RATHER GET A CAMERA OR TWO THAT i AM REALLY HAPPY WITH AND STOP HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT BUYING A CAMERA. But I am at that point now, as I have decided, that with this sp500 and maybe an sp310, all to put me back where I was 9 months ago...I am done. Or maybe an F20. Image stabilization combined with a super-ccd sensor should be *very* hard to beat. But it all depends on what happens with the image processing. There, you can either read all this, look at these shots, and take my word on it...or buy them and find out for yourself.

...I would say that in bright light, the s2, a700 and probably the s3 too, will give you decent, medium-quality shots that are "prim and proper". As long as you don't expect too much, you will be happy with them. They are both a clear notch above the s4, and the fz5 can match them in terms of image quality only when shooting in medium to low light. The sp500 is better in medium light and under certain conditions in bright light (it is susceptible to overload in bright light). At night the sp500 is handicapped by the lack of image stablization, but once put on a rest and focused decently, it will beat both the s2 and fz5 as it simply has a much better, cleaner, more detailed image than either the s2 or fz5, and less detail is lost due to excessive noise-reduction. And the sp310 is even better at night shooting than the sp500 as it has a bigger sensor with more pixels.

...beyond that any camera with a "slower" lens will have even more problems as the light goes down as it simply doesn't get the same amount of light in the shot and you pay the price. Here you have to make up for that with a great sensor. Not a generic 1/2.5" square-pixel CCD. The a700 has even more noise reduction than the s2 (and it's still noisy) plus the jpeg settings are lower Q at each resolution setting. The s4, even more so, and the TZ1 is just a disaster at low light levels. It's also a disaster in bright light...it's a disaster on so many levels.

I tell you they all make my Fuji a345 look good. Not even to mention the price difference. If this a600 had image stablization, I would probably be ready to keep it and move on. But I can see having to go with an sp320 to get that.

ok here we go...after shooting around in Greenwich Village Sunday, on a cloudy day, with the sp500, s2 and fz5...I'm pretty convinced of what I said about too much noise-reduction in the s2, and it is especially true in the fz5. The sp500 has moderate noise-reduction and that preserves a lot of detail, it seems to behave like the others at ISO400, boosting signal and luminace noise with a loss of textures and low-level color resolution. But at ISO200 or lower it is the only one of the three that preserves fine detail and texture. Even at ISO50 the s2 has crushing NR, the fz5 even worse, it is almost noise-free at ISO400 and the noise is undetectable to my eyes at ISO80-200, you can imagine how much NR is there at ISO80-200, and that is why the sp500 makes better-looking photos. Then the color is a little more "vibrant" than the s2 and more true to life than the fz5, so under night lights you get great-looking shots too. The downside is that the sp500 flares a little under extreme bright lights reflecting off white or metallic surfaces, not as much as the fz5 but still some. The s2 controls color extremes best in these situations while the fz5 is "brassy" and the sp500 is a little "peachy". But in almost all other light, shooting ISO80-200, the sp500 is clearly the most photo-realistic of the bunch. As it gets too dark, as the shot darkens, the textures get dark and the fine detail too dark to see, that advantage goes away, you are left to survive shooting by lights and here the fz5 and s2 can compete effectively. But still, if the light is good, or you shoot from a rest, the sp500 wins again. And again, I am speaking of the difference between leather seats and cloth seats. Sometimes cloth is better. But leather always looks good even when it is not practical. The fz5 is much more of a "throw it in your bag with an extra battery and/or the charger, hit the highway, whip it out and take shots" camera, it even has a great little screen, not too big or too small and with great resolution and brightness giving you a good view of what you shoot (frankly the shots will look better on the camera LCD than on your computer monitor), and I found that it will even fit in my pants pocket, even with that big 12x F3.3 zoom lens. It is by far the fastest of the three in burst mode, even with standard SD and shooting 5MP high-res it will click off 4 shots in no time. At night, shoot it ISO200 in S mode with the IS on and at something around 1/20 and it will do a good job of documenting your travels for you. I fully admit that there are times and there are shots that you will have the fz5 and know that you will need the s2 at least to get a good-looking shot, mainly shooting faraway, reflective subjects in bright light. The s2 is a lot more labor-intensive, bulky and heavy, due the larger size and weight, the flip-out screen and the cheesy lens cap and no guidelines on the viewfinder. Its real benefit is in the flexibility and the fact that it will give you "a decent looking shot under a wide range of conditions". Sort of a "techno"-looking shot, if you can deal with that, but well-controlled. It's high-speed burst is slow enough so that you can click off two-shot bursts with ease. The sp500 is for taking photographs. It has a burst mode but between the slow burst speed and the small cache and slow write to XD you can stall the camera easily just by taking a few bursts in close succession. It is not a "sport camera", even worse ISO400 halves the shot speed (this is one thing that is different about this new sp500 I have, the older ones are not like this). Remember you can buy SD almost anywhere, and only now is a 2GB XD card coming on the market.

Ok. so to torture this horse a little more. What do I mean by "texture", loss of highlight information, lack of fine detail, and "too much noise reduction"...

It's like the difference between 10.652 and 10. Take three numbers that are all with in 1/10th of 10. Average them. Replace them all with the average. That's what I mean. That's what the noise reduction on the s2 does. It seems to perform a moderate blur on the image, a substantial NR, then a sharpen and a contrast boost in a lame attempt to restore the vitality of the image. But it always comes out looking over-processed and "techno", dull, flat...just not photographic. You can get away with it under some conditions (where that detail is not there in the first place or the shot is too dark to sustain it), but in others it just crashes and burns. I have a shot here to show, as always...s2 owners are going to hate this...now this is not even in good light, it's an overcast day on the west side of Manhattan, late, about 6:30pm in August...the lights are starting to come on...I'm shooting ISO200 wide angle. Got almost the same shot with the s2 and the sp500 and it's even decently lit so that you can actually see the details and they are not too dark to see. Lucky, really.

Tell me which one has more fine detail, more image resolution...they are both 640x480 crops of a 2MP image, both ISO200. With the image settings all down to minimum, sharpness, contrast and saturation, on both cameras. The sp500 shot is high quality, the s2 shot is "fine". Yes that means the s2 is using 3/1 pixel compression vs 5/1 pixel compression for the sp500, but still. You're not going to see these differences due to that, you'd see a very little color blotching in solid bands of color and some moiree around the text. Standard Jpeg Q artifacts. Not what you see...or, don't see...here. Look at the grating near the top of the building, the watertank, the concrete trim running under each parapet...look at the windows...look at the orange building, to the rear...it almost looks like the s2 shot is unfocused, doesn't it?

That's what the NR is doing. It's crushing all the fine detail..."smoothing" it, filtering it out of the shot.

Note also that you don't see any patches of different color in the solid areas, which is what you'd get if the Q setting were too low. You'd get color noise in the solid color areas, the bigger the color area, the more noise you'd see. A complex image makes the jpeg algorithm save more of the color information, meaning you can shoot at a lower Q with less visible error, but there is less compression of the image for a given Q value. Shots like this you can take at "M" image quality without a really noticable effect. I took it at "S", the middle setting.

The problem is that the camera is dumping all the texture and fine detail information, anyway.

Now look at the sp500 shot.

That's why I bought a third sp500 after selling my 2nd one.

Ok last shot, last comment, last anything, on the s2, the last shot shows more of the same :)

The a700 has the same problem but worse, as it has a smaller, slower lens and is set up for the "budget" market. Q settings are lower so there is noticable distortion at low image quality. Again, Canon makes up for it by boosting the color settings and the sharpness. But they cannot put back what they have thrown away.

Other than that the s2 is a decent camera. Needs the reference guides in the viewfinder...needs a lenscap that stays on...needs a better, higher-resolution LCD....needs bigger, better control indications in the viewfinder, most of this they fixed in the s3...the s3 still has too much noise-reduction, I am almost sure, though, admittedly, I have not shot one. I will say this, before I shot the s2 at 5MP and took a real close look at the images, I would never have guessed that it had a noise problem that they were fixing with a lot of NR. But they are. To their credit, Canon has created a camera which is good for a wide range of shots, if all you want to do is take a picture, gather some visual evidence. But still, in very bright light this camera will take very good, well-controlled shots when an sp500 and especially an fz5 will saturate on the reflections.

Enough said.

"if this camera (the s2) were the size and weight of my dmc-fz5, with a better lens cap (like the fz5 :), and the viewfinder out to the left (like the fz5 :) it would be perfect."

...no, it would still have too much noise-reduction.

The NR on this camera is so heavy that unless you're shooting at full zoom, there's no point in shooting over 2MP.

Other than that, I have no real problems with the image, and my problems lie solely with the operation of the camera and its size and weight. And the lack of a viewfinder grating.

and the flip screen, which is a pain just as much as a benefit.

and the lack of multi-zone AF.

...the one thing with this camera, you will not look at the shots and say the colors look funky.

You will look at the shots and say they are "pastel". Sharp, clean, not bright or garish but subdued, and "pastel".

They are "pastel" because all the fine detail has been removed by the noise-reduction filtering.

so, I found peace with it...the colors are generally accurate and it does not scare...I shoot it at ISO50 ( I shoot all my cameras at the highest resolution now, all the time, at the lowest ISO possible given the shutter speed and the zoom setting) with the IS on continuous mode, all the time, only bumping up the ISO for full-zoom shots or up to ISO200 when it drops down below 1/30s. I generally don't bother shooting it at IS0400 (it's too noisy for that, except with a lot of streetlight to cover the noise) and I really try hard to stay at ISO50. Also I set the contrast and saturation down a notch using custom colors, thus increasing the dynamic range and avoiding overcolorization.

In good light it can do great work. If you are very careful you will even get photos that are aligned, not tilted :) without a doubt it could use the big flashing "the ISO is now 80, the ISO is now 100" message that the s3 has.

But hey, I own it...and it's not bad. And I was right: at photokina this summer Canon introduced the 7MP a710.

So, here are some shots worth sharing...a shot of the Red Cross headquarters on 17thstNW in DC...a shot of a kid kicking a goal in a soccer game at 8pm, and yes, it was lit only with the field lights...ISO400 1/15sec or so, continuous focus and IS...I think that'll do it...I really haven't shot it much lately. But I won't sell it. It's worth too much to sell, for what I will get for it.

...ignoring the excessive noise reduction and large weight and size, the flopping lens cap and the other minor details that don't affect image quality...this is a good camera. There is nothing really wrong with the image except for the excess noise-reduction but at least that is limited to the low-intensity sections of the shot, the dark parts. One last thing, the a700 is a little "mini" version of this camera, with one fatal flaw. The jpeg Q settings are too low at each resolution on the a700. Shoot it at fine or superfine, please, for your own sake :) Getting 2000 shots out of a 2Gig card at medium sounds great but half of those shots will have obvious compression flaws.

Just to show what the 12x zoom means. I took this at 1600x1200, 2MP, standing about 20 feet away while it was swimming around in a poind. It was amazingly difficult...I'm trying to take it at ISO200, not 400, to keep the noise down...and it's moving, and I'm pointing down at the ground, there was not a lot of light to be shooting a full-zoom shot...but I wasn't sure it was fast enough, so I ended up shooting it at 1/125 f3.5 iso200 with slightly less than full zoom, and 1/250 f3.5 iso400 at full zoom, both with continuous IS. See if you can tell the difference from these crops.

Seems to me to prove that a steady hand, continuous IS, a slow shutter and a lower ISO beats a sloppy hold with IS and a fast shutter speed at high ISO. Simply reduces the noise and the NR, giving a much more "crisp" shot. Yes, you've got to have *enough* shutter-speed...but how do you know what is enough? Simple: practice shooting at different shutter speeds/ISO/zoom combinations. Practice, practice, practice, get to know your camera, for that moment when the shot you really want is right there and leaving fast. Know how slow you can shoot your camera at full zoom and still get a good photo. Everything short of that is gravy.

Don't forget the benefit of shooting at 5MP instead of 2MP :) You don't need to shoot at the same high shutter speed to get a good shot, with the same # of pixels on your subject.

So, still. "12x zoom" on a 1/2.5" sensor with a 5.8-72mm lens isn't all that much, is it? Use the whole sensor. Don't throw away 80% of your pixels. And then you will see what heavy NR costs you, not to mention excessive contrast and saturation...and also, that slow f2.8/f4.8 lens.

I'm still not ready to pony up for a DSLR, though. This will do fine...I don't shoot in twilight all that much :)

...I almost never read the other reviews (who cares about what I say about the features, you can read about them on the corporate website) but I just glanced over one and I saw the guy say "with the price of SD nowadays, why not shoot at superfine all the time?"


Simple, because you will get files that are 500k, 1MB and 1.5MB+ shooting medium, fine and superfine at 2MP (the "M" setting). Corresponding to Jpeg Q settings of about 72, 85 or so, and off the scale past 95. Depending on how much detail is in the shot (less detail=more compression=smaller file). That's not a problem for the camera, or the card (other than you can store 3x the # of images at medium that you can store at superfine). Try storing and managing images at those various sizes. Now, as I suggested earlier, if you shoot at 5MP instead of 2MP, you can just scale those sizes. It is a lot better to shoot 5MP at fine, than 2MP at superfine, trust me you won't see the difference between fine and superfine unless you look at the images with a magnifying glass, at native resolution on your monitor. They will not be "photographic" anyway due to the image processing and noise reduction in the camera, and only at medium compression can I really see any compression flaws (mainly involving signs, straight lines and text where there will be color bleeding and moiree, the usual overcompression artifacts).

I shoot at 5MP/fine...I'd suggest that to anyone who wants good images. I frankly would fear the concept of managing 5MP superfine images, even though, yes, my 2GB SD cards will handle 250 of them, each, easily, and 2GB cards are $40 each now. Where are you going to store them? I have 25GB of image data from about 9 months of shooting, I'll shoot 200 images at a pop, every time I take one of my cameras out. Most of what I have is 2MP/"medium". My monitors are 2MP format, so with 5MP images I'm throwing away over half the pixels just to display the full image. I shoot at 5MP mainly so I have more freedom to crop. Just switching from "fine" to superfine means 3x the file size, I'd have to have 3x the number of portable drives, moving them around would take 3x as long...it would be twice the work. For an infinitesimal improvement in image quality for each file...for images coming off an s2, not a good DSLR. And what happens when your "great images" get corrupted, which does happen once in a while?

As I keep repeating to myself, don't take this all so seriously :)

Well, other than that I write about what is important to me, as an owner and as, dare I say, a "photographer". Take all these glowing reviews with a grain of salt. What really counts is the image quality, then the userfriendliness. If the controls don't give you good pictures, they aren't helping much. It's like having 72 dashboard controls in a Honda Civic. It's still not going to compete with a Suzuki Katana. If you wish to drive the Civic anyway because you like the cool features and it's warm and dry in the rain...realize that you're not going to care if you are driving 55Mph instead of 100MPH. Don't chase the 1% improvement for 3x the effort.

To me, that's how I know a "reviewer" is blowing hot air. And mainly why I don't read the reviews...though I guess maybe somewhere some of them say something interesting or useful.

Last but not least, wait until someone sees you with one of these and whips out a cameraphone and takes the same picture, then looks at you like you're crazy. He doesn't know what he's missing, won't care until he finds out, and you aren't going to be able to show him by showing the same shot on your little 1.8" s2 LCD screen. And where is your 1600x1200 monitor, your 1200dpi bubblejet printer? Back home. You have to be happy with them yourself. And I can think of 10 other cameras that can't even get close to the s2...and the s2 can't get close to a real DSLR. You would pay more for a decent DSLR lens than you would pay for an s2. Don't sweat it.


Ultimately I would recommend this to someone who is interested in photography, as a good learning tool. It's certainly not the most convenient camera to use or the best digital camera on the market. But it is a good, manageable yet powerful start, one a beginner can handle and still get some good mileage out of and you can actually take some respectable photos with it under a good variety of conditions while you learn its strengths and weaknesses. And now you can get one for $250 instead of $400+ :) that's a very good thing.


...would your really want to take this shot at superfine? Just a casual shot I took while driving to Pittsburg. No, I'm not going to shoot this at 5MP superfine, sorry. Would it look better? Yes. The roadsign would look sharp and crisp. BFD. I don't know if you have noticed yet but the s2 has wiped most of the fine detail out of the shot already (and from there I had to downsample it to fit it to this servers' format).

But this is a textbook example of why I want to shoot 5MP not 2MP. I started out with a 2MP image at 4:3 (the s2 cannot shoot 16:9 or 3:2), cropped a large amount of road and sky out of it, I was left with a 1MP shot. I cropped it further, to 720x600 or so...then downsampled it to 640x480. Just three steps! On top of the s2s' noise reduction, that is why this looks so smudgy. With a 5MP shot I could have cropped on the truck and the skyline and had a nice *2MP* shot (and still would have had to throw away 2/3rds of it to show you the shot at all :). Or, yes, I could have shot it at, well, let's try 40mm zoom...with one hand while driving at 65MPH...at ISO200...sure. There would have been snow in April and it would have taken 5 minutes of high-speed shooting to get one shot that was aligned. I had about 5 seconds to set the camera up and take this shot.

You really have to watch out for people who don't live their own advice. I seriously doubt that anyone shoots this camera in superfine all the time, if they do they're probably also dumb enough to shoot 1MP too. Likewise, about the features, I have never shot a movie with it in the 6 months that I've had it, and I have read the manual most of the way through but not in the past 4 months. It's a camera, not a flight simulator, and I am an amateur photographer, not a professional pilot........and...this camera is so big and heavy you will not want to carry it with you, anyway, unless you are a true geek like me or a pro photographer who wants a smaller, lighter camera than his DSLR rig, that will still take decent photos when it is not a good idea to bring out the $2k DSLR. It's just not user-friendly that way.

forgot to add the photo :)

one last thing...regardless of what I wrote, to keep this short too...all of the cameras I talked about have problems with too much noise reduction wiping away the fine detail in shots in places where there is not a lot of light intensity. Even the sp500. The A700 has another problem of the jpeg q settings being so low that color noise is added by the compression. There are problems in the following areas. Excessive NR kills fine detail especially where the shots are "brown" or darker. Low-contrast regions are washed of detail. Excessive *contrast* in the image processing kills the shot by overblowing the bright areas (so that whites are no longer white, they are some funky beige color) and overdarkening the dark areas (so that the shadows are blacked out). Excessive *saturation* kills the shot by making the bright colors look, well, "fake". Overlit. Over bright. Just too much color. *Then* you can have color noise and compression artifacts...then with the TZ1 there is some sort of internal reflection problem (the type that is solved with an ED coating on a good lens), some "hazing" in bright light, that seems to come from the prizm they use to shorten the lens. Then with the fz5 and the s4, say, you can have flare problems where the sun gets into the lens, directly, making occasionally "cool" but sometimes problematic purple zones on the shot.

The problem the s2 has is 90% excessive NR and in the default color setting a little too much saturation and contrast. It is a better camera than the a700 (which is overcompressed as well as over NR'd), the two together are better cameras photographically than the s4 and Tz1 by far, which have almost all of the above image flaws, the s4 to a lesser degree than the TZ1 (but without a doubt the s4 has a lot of NR, the shots from it are butter-smooth). The Olympus sp500 and sp320 are somewhere between the two sets of cameras in terms of image quality, but obviously with less NR than the Canons. In great light they will give you all the detail they can, but in bright light they tend to oversaturate and the Canons will look better, more accurate in the colors. But, backing off the saturation and the contrast with the Olympus cameras solves most (but not all) of their image problems, they can still get a little cruddy in low light (but if you are shooting long exposures at night these are the cameras you want, they are much sharper and more detailed than the s2 at night, which is better than the a700 at night, which is way better than the s4 at night...it has so much NR that at night you basically get blobs of color from it. You do not want to shoot at night with the s4. The Fz5 is between the sp500 and the s4, it is a cleaner but much less noise-reduced version of the s4 in terms of image quality (and very good at night shooting if you can handle the brown tint), and the Fuji F650 is about where the s4 is but with less NR (but still too much).

Fuji cameras are clean, flat, and punched up with excess saturation but very good color balance. The Canons make a name for themselves by being modest yet good performers in terms of image processing. Like the guy that sings the National Anthem before a ballgame, you can depend on them for a competent performance. The others are like Dancing with the Stars. Flashes of brilliance...areas of great competence...combined with severe weaknesses. You will not know where the weaknesses are for each one, unless you look at all my reviews or get them and try them yourself :)

And that is why I have written so much. Partially to make sure I understand, myself...partially to explain to others.

Read the first line of this comment again and you will know what I know. And I'm done.

Re these shots...I am trying to show you what I am saying, but in having to downsample a 2MP shot to 640x480, a lot of the image detail is lost. This is what I can do. But also this is why some of these cameras produce images that look just fine at 640x480 or 1MP but look like crap at 2MP and up. In this case the coolpix4800 shot looks a lot better at this resolution. These shots were all taken at full zoom from about 2 miles distance, on a rest, about 4s exposures at the lowest ISO (the cp4800 can do at most 2s exposures in program mode, I took this in fireworks mode, the other option was to use night landscape mode which uses ISO200 and is not half bad but brightens up the shot too much and adds noise...still it is a lot better at night shooting than the s4).

My final comment!!!!

If you want to see what your camera can do, what sort of bat it swings...shoot it at its highest resolution and look at the images in their native resolution. Take that 5MP image and look at it undownsampled on a 2MP monitor! Don't be afraid to get close to your images and look them square in the pixels. That's what you have. Work with it or return it!

...also don't forget that you can brighten dark shots and sharpen dull shots with a decent image-processing program. Learn something about digital filtering and how it works on photographs. Learn about log filters and edge and sharpen filters and noise filters for those cases where you forgot to set the ISO back down. You can fix a lot of problem shots with these.

Get a copy of Lview if you don't want to buy Photoshop.

You're not going to turn a bad camera into a good one...but you can fix a lot of average to poor shots and make them decent. Or turn an ok shot into a great one with a little touch-up.

1/250 f4.5 ISO200 center-weighted average, 6.8mm zoom (about 40mm in 35mm format), fine quality...definitely not a good one for ISO200. Too much color noise and "grit", especially with only fine. And too much loss of fine detail. The full size shot is 1600x1200 and it's just short of a "watercolor" photo. The colors are in the right places but everything is smoothed-out.

I'm forced to begin using superfine to eliminate the moire and optical distortion resulting from too much compression, in wide-angle shots...especially when shooting 2MP and up...and now I won't shoot this camera in anything higher than ISO50 unless absolutely necessary. Now that I can really tell the problem with shooting ISO200..now that I shoot at 5MP all the time (but you can see the image problems even at 2MP on a 2MP monitor). Downsampling cures many ills...oversampling exposes many, in return. This camera also likes a well-lit surface but it is not going to go batty if forced to shoot a dark subject or ISO200+. It is not a good "high-quality" substitute for a DSLR though, certainly not over ISO100. Not only is a DSLR going to have a bigger lens and a bigger sensor, it will have a cleaner sensor and better image processing. I would say that the s2 is to a DLSR as an a700 or any other 3x zoom point and shoot is to the s2. There are shots where a 3x point and shoot will give results that are just about as good as you can get from a DSLR. But those shots are few and far between compared to the entire range of photos and lighting conditions that one can shoot with a DSLR and get good shots. Especially shooting wide-angle.

Still, this camera blows away a Nikon s4 or TZ1. That's a much lower league than the s2.

shot this in spot mode under a balcony on a sunny day. Crop and downsampled full image, from a fine-mode 5MP shot.

last comment...I was reading the other reviews hoping to spot something that I missed, if you see anything please let me know :) somehow...

this is a pretty-good camera, though all the Canons below it are ok, really. Splitting hairs...this camera, with the bigger lens, has more sensitivity than the Canon A-frames at lower light levels. You get that for the increase in size and weight. At ISO50 the images look the same...the s3 goes in a different direction, with noticably more color noise. I would like to see how cameras stack up against this one in two years or so, when they are jamming more and more pixels into a smaller space and using smaller lenses. I mean, for full size prints that may be the way to go. When I look at the image on my screen, if I look at it full-res, I can see every little problem with the camera. Do I need twice the resolution with a crappy lens, crappy image-processing and a noisy sensor? Do I need to see every zit on Katic Couric's face at 640x480? Probably not. Honestly.

Now, if they would also give you the same real resolution, by going to a wider lens? That could be very cool. A panoramic 28mm-280mm f2.8/f4.0 14MP camera with SDHD? I could go for that. Otherwise you might as well stick with the A-frames out now that have SDHD. They're pretty good cameras in a great format.

But please Canon fix them so that they stay in burst mode when I turn off the power!!!!!!! Seriously if a fast burst is your real need, get the Panasonic Fz5. It shoots easily twice as fast as the S2 even in "high-speed mode". This camera has a fast *zoom*, not a fast *burst*. End of review :)

iso50 evaluative, about an hour before dark. 23mm in the camera (about 200mm in 35mm format). Sharpness, saturation, contrast down to -1, fine mode, 5MP downsampled ect. I guess that IS was on. I usually turn it on if a stable image is at all a question.

I find that it's a lot easier to add stuff in than to take it out. This is untouched, out of the camera. You can see that this camera hardly needs any sharpening. Just less NR.

The second thing that it could really use is a horizontal and vertical grating.

Last I should have shot this in superfine. I thought that I was shooting in superfine! I was quite wrong about that and the ISO at times, too. And I've had this camera for almost a year!

Look at the grating under the house deck, in the cropped shot. And on the roof.

All that color noise, that's from too high a compression ratio. You would never see that at 1 or 2MP.

This camera can take some really good pictures in the hands of a good photographer. It is NOT a DSLR. But...how much better is a DSLR? Well, right here, at full resolution, as it is getting dark, you can see. But only when looking at full resolution.

Otherwise you might as well just get a decent point and shoot, and with a little more light or on a tripod, any of the A or S-series Canons can take this shot. Probably with even better and easier focusing, now that most of them have AiAf.

handheld iso200 2MP shot cropped and downsampled. 1-fifth second exposure with IS on, f2.8.

pretty good white balance, huh?

oops, those last two (the slightly brown ones) are from an fz5. Here are the correct images.

well, you can never say enough about a good thing, right?

Ok two more things and that's it.

One, the slight whitish-grayish-pinkish tint and haziness, especially on buildings, which seems to be common to most Canons, seems to come from insufficient contrast. If I kick it up a bit I get rid of that and the colors become significantly harder, almost too hard. A touch of additional contrast works wonders. The shots are still over-cleansed, though, with almost no texture or fine-detail...and thus I am forcibly reminded that this is no DSLR, not even a 5MP DSLR like the Nikon D50...the shot here is 8 sec exposure, iso100, f7.1 superfine 2MP shot with 640x480 crops and a downsampled 640x480 fullsize shot. Again: it'll look fine at 2MP and below. At full resolution on a 2MP monitor, you're going to see a lot of ugly things. There simply is no texture in this photograph and it's not very sharp either. For the last time: this camera is not bad. It is not that good, either.

ok I am now a firm believer in 5MP superfine mode.

ISO80 again

one thing I'd like to add, I think the images coming off this camera are oversharpened significantly...also under zoom the colors begin to look pastel and there's a little bluriness to the left of center.

The last thing is the biggest problem with it. This camera is really overkill for what it does well, shooting wide-angle in good light, but it is not good enough for all it tries to do, such as shooting under high zoom, and the IS is not really all that great which limits the low-light performance in handheld shooting. It's better than not having it, I guess, but it doesn't really boost the camera performance significantly. Still better than not having it. Slightly.

But I think that in low light I would almost have to shoot wide-angle thus totally negating even the 6x zoom of the A700. At that point I'd rather have a larger aperture and better noise performance, certainly any attempt at shooting zoom needs IS and a big aperture, not F4.8, or even F3.6. At that point, I'd rather have a G6 than an S2, and choosing between the s2 and a700 is based on how much light I have to shoot in. In that narrow window of light where the s2 is able to shoot ISO200 and the A700 would have to go to ISO400, the s2 is better but the G6 would be better still. Below that, they alll have to go on a rest or use flash, so what difference does it make. Then in bright light the a700 has AiAf which is easily better than spot-mode alone, especially when shooting wide-angle. So, with the s2, you get that big zoom which you will very rarely use to any real benefit over 6x, 99% of the time it will be too much zoom, all at the cost of a bigger, heavier camera with a crappy lens cover that you can't just leave in your pocket and forget about, with better low-light performance than the A700, true, but not as good as the G6. The images from the A700, in fine or superfine mode, are so close to the s2 in quality that it really negates the larger size and bulk, and the extra zoom power of the s2 is really only usable in bright light or on a tripod. That 2x extra zoom costs you about half the shutter speed so you are about 4x less likely to use full zoom on the s2 than with the a700 so 8x max would have been a much better bargain and 15x would make my point that much more clear. If you shoot 5MP you will almost never use the full 12x and if you do the images will only be about half the depth of field as the 6x images from the a700, plus the a700 has a higher MP to make up smoe of that. Not much but some. So the a700 is about 90% of the camera that the s2 is, at half the size and weight, with almost the same features plus AiAf and a much better lens cap. The only saving grace, really, is the extra low-light performance due to the bigger, faster lens and IS. No doubt this does matter, but so does the size and weight. When you carry an s2, you are tied to the s2, taking photographs becomes your raison d'etre. When you carry an A700, the A700 is tied to you. You can live your life and take some above-average photographs along the way, if the light is good or if you can find a good rest, and, most of all, if it makes sense to take them. With the s2 you are pretty-much in "shooter "mode all the time, you are looking for shots just to justify carrying it (not to mention buying it), then you have to be conscious of it all the time or else it will get broken or stolen right off you. And it's not even that good a camera. The s2 is the classic "cart before the horse" problem, and the cart isn't even that useful. Unless you intend to make a living with your photographs, and then, are you using an s2? A camera that has a lens cap that falls off if you brush against it, that you can't put filters on without a big, bulky adapter? That can't even shoot raw...with a lens that isn't of the quality of the image-processing in the camera? With an LCD the size of your thumb? I don't think so. You'd rather use at least a Digital Rebel first.

That's why I think that overall the a700 is a better camera than the s2 for that $250. Heck if you've read this far you've already bought an A700, maybe even an A540, and at most you're just reinforcing your wise decision. I am now looking forward to trying the a710 :) which I hope fixes the few problems that the a700 has, namely the lack of IS which it needs due to the small lens, to keep from having to shoot ISO400. And the a710 has SDHD. If you're going to shoot the camera at full res and in superfine mode, that will come in handy, easily quadrupling the # of shots per SD card. Yes high-capacity SDHD will cost a lot more than a 2GB SD card, for a while. But when that changes? Would you prefer to have to shoot 2MP to keep pace?

Then why not just get a good cellphone camera?

So I have no more comments to make about the image quality or features of this camera, no more samples to post. It will take good shots, if slightly oversharpened, and significantly over noise-reduced. My main beef with it is the size and weight. Just going to the A700 means half the weight, half the battery weight, half the depth, and less width, plus no lenscap worries. You lose the flip LCD but you would rarely shoot off it anyway and most of the time it is more of a pain than a benefit. You lose the EVF, but so what, just shoot off the LCD. The only time you will really want the s2 is when it begins to get dark, and you are forced to use ISO400 or 800 on the a700. You would almost never use the full zoom or the tilt feature of the LCD...so try to forget about them. The A700 is, by far, a much better deal, even at the same price, for most people. And a great gift for those who have no real urge to take pictures but wouldn't mind having a good easy to use camera that will indeed take good photos.

one last comment, when the image is a little "burnt-looking"?

that's overexposure.

the s2 seems to do that often in evaluative mode. Especially on high-contrast shots. Just a little overcooked, depending on how much skylight is in the shot. If you see a reddish tint to the shot, that's what it is.

Of course it can underexpose, too, in these same situations...
I think it might be better to use the auto-bracket rather than the burst. You just have to guess which way to bias the bracket.

I just have to post this one because it looks so good.

It's a good example of why the s2 is a better camera than the a700 and fz5...but also of exactly what I was talking about earlier. This shot looks good partially because it is an s2 shot but mostly because it is an ISO50 S2 shot. First is a 640x480 crop of a similar shot from an Fz5 at ISO80, the second two are from an s2 at ISO50. If I had taken it at ISO200, there would be very little fine detail, it would be very low resolution and it would be hard to say that this shot looks any good regardles of whether it is an s2 shot or not (though it would still be noticably better than the fz5 regardless of the ISO used on the FZ5).

Clearly the s2 is really destroying the fz5 in terms of image fidelity. However, the s2 still has too much NR that wipes away fine detail, especially dark fine detail. The point is that an A700 will take almost the same shot if there is enough light. If there is not and you need the bigger lens then the s2 is required to get this or you will get a somewhat noisy and possibly even blurry high ISO A700 shot compared to a nice clean s2 shot at a lower ISO. This is the rare case where the s2 justifies its bulk over the a700.

So, if you plan to do a lot of long-distance wide-angle landscape shooting in low light, the s2 is what you want to get. If you don't think that you'll be taking many shots across distances like the Baltimore Inner Harbor in late afternoon light, then the a700 is just fine for you. And probably a better all-around deal. Under no conditions would I want to use a Panasonic camera for such a shot unless I had no plans to try to view the resulting image in high resolution. But, likewise, if I am taking a tight shot or the subject is close, the Panasonic is good enough. Really the only way to tell the difference betwen these cameras, in terms of IMAGES, is to use them at or near their limits. But it is very easy to see which is more convenient to carry and to use.

I should add that the previous shot was in superfine mode iso50.

You can still see the NR along the wooden beams by the edge of the water, the edge of the pier, under the tower. Notice that the wood doesn't have any fine detail.

but this is looking at the hairs on a gnat. Overall it is a really good shot. But if you don't take it in superfine at iso50 you won't see this level of detail. ISO100+ adds even more NR and fine and medium correspondingly increase compression and reduce image detail. The full-size 2MP shot is 1.3MB. A 2MP 24-color bitmap would be 6MB. It's using a compresson ratio of under 10:1. This camera did a really, really good job with this shot but you would not see the quality that it is capable of, with most shots.

I just happened to take this as a test shot, just to see exactly what the difference was in terms of image quality, between all these availble settings. And I didn't notice this until just now. The thing is, it's only a 2MP shot...and...it's a 1-200 f4.0 iso50 superfine shot at 28mm, under 6x zoom. Handheld. It would be really hard to get a better shot than this, handheld.

I meant to post the full-size shot downsampled, not the same 640x480 crop twice...

...I think the difference between the quality of the focus in my comment #15 vs #16 is obvious.

There's a lot to be said for a good focus ;)

also for shooting wide-angle and for long focal lengths. Hard to get the focus wrong, then.

I must confess. This camera is a lot better than I thought it was at first. But without shooting it at its limits, at 5MP and superfine and ISO50, you would never know.

It probably can compete well with some low-end DSLRs, in good light or on a tripod, where it can shoot ISO50. And the difference would only be in the level of fine detail.

End of review.

...I don't know, I guess that I've just taken too many photos with other cameras that have come out good, and too many with this camera that were nothing special, and too many times I've felt that it is just too big and heavy and the lens cap is too hokey, to be worth it because of the image quality...but I have to admit that I have found some really good looking shots that I have taken with this camera over the past 9 months, simply because I have been trying to find out exactly what it can do that's better than my other ones. I mean, "now I know", but still. I hate the lens cap. It annoys me that a $500 camera can have such a cheesy lens cap over such a valuable part of the camera. And it does weigh substantially more than any other camera that I've ever owned. And the text in the viewfinder screen is really too small. Would I rather have an s3? I don't know. I think that I got lucky...the s3 really does have noticable color noise in all ISO modes. And it has the same cheesy lenscap. Otherwise the s3 looks really cool. But they didn't fix the *problems* had with the s2 (except for the small text), they just made it better-looking. Also it needs a sunscreen over the viewfinder eyepiece. That hard rubber thing just protects the camera from your skull, I end up switching eyes just to block the light.

But it does take good photos. I will grant it that.

well this last one and that's it.

I stumbled onto these two they are almost the same shot, taken with an FZ5 and an s2, in superfine 2MP both. the FZ5 shot is 38mm and the s2 shot is 28 mm so I first cropped the FZ5 shot to look the same as the s2 shot. Then I corrected the exposure on both and backed off the saturation and contrast on the fz5 shot as it was shot in vivid mode. And then downsampled the FZ5 shot slightly to the same dimensions as the s2 shot and then downsampled them both to 640x480 so they are now almost exactly the same shot at the same size and the same zoom, effectively. And as I was doing this it became apparent that the difference between the two shots was REAL hard to see. But there are differences that can be seen. It is easier to see them at 2MP of course, but you can still see differences even at 640x480. For one this is hard to see at 6x4 but the S2 shot is a little more crisp and clean than the FZ5 shot. But, laying them one on top of the other one can see that the s2 shot is not all that crisp and the fz5 shot is not all that "muddy". It is more like the difference in the compression factors, more than anything else. But that is not all. If you look at the edges of the buildings, in the FZ5 shot you can see a distinct nonlinearity to the slope, that is not there in the s2 shot. Look at the side of the building with the P on it, to the left of the P. There you can see distinct lines in the fz5 shot, that are not there in the s2 shot. You can also see that the 3 stripes are not even in the fz5 shot. The shape of the lavender awnings isn't consistent, the colors are not consistent...the trees are slightly smudgy, the grass under the trees is smudgy, the lamppost at the right corner of the grassy area is smudgy, the safety rails aren't as crisp and clear, to the right...the texture of the wood on the dock isn't as clear and crisp...the FZ5 is taking the shot and just distorting it more than the s2 is, and that is the difference. And you can even see that here, it is quite easy to see at 2MP, not to mention 5MP, where there's no downsample effect to deal with. At 2MP you can easily see that the McCormick and Schmidt text over the restaurant, at the lower left, is much cleaner on the s2 shot. It's not "clean"...but it's a lot cleaner and less fuzzy. It's just a better looking shot, period. I look at the s2 shot and I see nothing obviously wrong with it (except some faint fine detail), I look at the fz5 shot and I can see optical distortion all over it. True, a close look at each and they don't look so much different, but, overall, the s2 shot just looks "normal" and the fz5 shot doesn't. I should mention the fz5 shot is 38mm at 1-400 f4.0 iso80 fine-mode (4:1 compression) and the s2 is 28mm at 1-200 f4.0 superfine mode (5:1 compression). The shots are taken 20 minutes apart, with the fz5 shot 20 minutes earlier at 7pm. And you may ask, "if the fz5 is zooming in more, how can it be taken at almost twice the shutter speed of the s2?" Well, clearly the s2 is iso50 and the Fz5 is iso80 but one is closer to ISO50 and the other is closer to ISO100. For the icing on the cake I have put a "comparison crop" where I overlaid the s2 shot on the fz5 shot so you can see the same fine detail part of each shot, but at 2MP, then cropped that to 640x480. There's no doubt that the s2 shot is cleaner and more crisp. Yet the shot isn't "shaky". It's just that everything is more "pastel" in the fz5 shot. Smudgy, smeary, less crisp. Not hugely, obviously, s4-type pastel. But still pastel. And not sharp. Enough so that the eye is just not happy with it...even though "it doesn't look that bad". It doesn't look good. I mean, it's good enough for the Panasonic salesperson to sell to the average Joe walking in off the street without feeling like they are ripping them off, but I doubt that they would buy one themselves. Both shots can be made more "intense" by decreasing the exposure, decreasing the gamma. But how to fix the pastelization and fuzziness in the FZ5 shot? Well, one way would be to trade it for an s2...

"...I don't know, I guess that I've just taken too many photos with other cameras that have come out good, and too many with this camera that were nothing special, "


...if you shoot it above ISO50 or in fine mode, especially in medium mode, you will be throwing away most of the fine detail in the shot. At ISO50 this camera begins to take real photographs. In superfine mode they become downright photogenic. Then you will want to back off the sharpening, as it really is set up a little too sharp for general use. The saturation also is a little too high for good color balance.


And it overexposes most of the time.

Still it's better than I thought.

"when a little bit of knowledge is dangerous" :)

F6.3 1-640 ISO100 2MP medium-mode wide-angle shot in Manhattan.


This is what I mean by "I've taken so many underwhelming shots with this camera". First of all it is a little fuzzy and hazy and that's for two reasons one the overexposure and second the overcompression and over NR from shooting at ISO100 in medium mode. Second it's kicking butt on the s4 shots that I took, and even the a700 shots...which of course I took in medium mode, too, and the a700 generally had to use a higher ISO than the s2.

Now you are no longer ignorant! :)

Shoot superfine iso50 as much as possible, with the IS on.

...last word: neither the a700 nor the fz5 can match the s2 in terms of all-around image quality, and in fact for the occasional wide-angle shot I do wish that the FZ5 were better. But even then it is not all that bad, and for most other shots it is fine, they are about the same. It is more a matter of getting the exposure right than any fundamental flaw in the FZ5, though it does have fundamental image flaws, it simply is not as sharp, crisp and clean as the S2 when shooting wide-angle. It really, really really needs a lower compression setting, wtih a mere 4:1 compression it is impossible to take really good, high-resolution "photographs" with the FZ5. But the FZ5 is a lot more fun to carry and shoot than the s2. Half because of the bulk, and half because of the lens cap. It is just really nice to not have to worry about the lens cap falling off because it is so loose, or worry about dropping the camera itself because it is so big and heavy, when you pull the camera out of the bag, and you have to carry the s2 in a bag, it is too big for a pocket...especially with that cheesy lens cap, you can't carry it in your pocket. Not to mention the 9-point AF of the FZ5 compared to the spot focus of the S2. So *using* the S2 becomes this big production. I get to the point where I don't even want to deal with it.

...so, while I know that the S2 will take better-looking shots...I would much rather take my FZ5 with me. Certainly as long as I'm not shooting anything "serious", that I'm just shooting for fun. On a scale from 1 to 10, in terms of image quality, the FZ5 is about a 7.5, maybe an 8. The s2 is a 8.5 to 9. The s2 is not perfect, either. Aside from image-quality the FZ5 is a better carry. Not to mention that in burst mode it is twice as fast as the S2. So, don't think too much of the S2. And if you buy one, be prepared for the occasional shots that you are not happy wtih, even if you shoot it in superfine mode, it is good but still not a DSLR. Still it is better than an A700 or TZ1 and an S4 cannot even compare with it. The s2 is obviously better than any of those but they are all half the size and weight of the s2, with a much better screen..much more convenient to carry. But really only useful in good light. The thing is that I doubt that a G7 would be any better, in that regard, because it has the same lens as the A700. Sure the sensor might be a little bigger but, come on. That lens is standing in the shadow of the S2's lens. I truly doubt that it is worth $600 in any way, you'd be better off just getting the A640.

This is how I think that it is best to look at the s2.

It's a great camera with a 12x zoom, that takes good photos in both wide angle and under zoom.

It does not take great photos, it is not easy to carry or to use, and it certainly is not convenient to carry. But it is a hell of a lot cheaper than a DSLR with a 412mm zoom, and the photos that it takes are certainly of a quality commensurate with the price.

You would spend probably 10x as much to get a camera that is maybe a little better. Or you could go for a Nikon 8800 which is probably a little better image-quality wise with the same zoom performance, but at 4x the price. It is tough to get that zoom and that image quality, together. And to beat this camera will require either spending a lot of money, or trading away the zoom. Even a G6 would require trading the zoom away and spending twice as much. I'd rather have this camera than a G6, even knowing that the G6 takes better photos. It's not worth twice the price, not to me...and i can't see how it would be...unless you needed a high-capacity wide-angle camera then the format might make the difference worth the money. But why shoot 4:3 or even 3:2, then?

The G6 or G7 with a 16:9 mode would make a HELL of a lot more sense then dropping $1k, $2k or $5k on a Canon 30D or something ridiculous like that. Still the S2 would put them all to shame for 99% of the shots that you'd take with any of them.


So, to me, in summary...the S2 is a competitor for the higher-end of the camera market, but clearly not the best pocket carry or mid-range carry. That's not its game. Its game is making a 5-8MP DSLR seem like a complete waste of money.

And that it does very well...BUT IT WOULD DO THAT BETTER IF IT HAD A REAL LENS CAP!!!!!!

:)

And frankly the s2 loses to DSLRs the same way that the A700 loses to the S2. The sensor is just too small to compete in low light with a DSLR. Once you have to shoot the S2 at ISO100 or up, the DSLR will beat it every time.

But...how often is that? Is that enough of a problem to really be worth the cash?

No. Not at $240 for an S2. No way. At that price, it's a steal.

plus I would remind you to take a look at reply #23 here, because if the s2 has one glaring weakness other than the lens cap, it is the long-exposure night performance. It seems to shoot fuzzy long exposures, definitely needs to be shot at ISO50 to maximize image resolution but that also lengthens the exposure. While it is "competent", I would not reach for this camera first for night shots.

I mean, really. It's not a bad camera, obviously it can take some good, crisp shots in good light. Better than a lot of cameras. But given the noticable loss of fine detail it is not the best for wide-angle shooting, given the noticable high-zoom optical distortion it is not the best for zoom shooting, and given the size, weight and lens cap it is definitely not the best for carrying...it just has some major weaknesses that overall bring it down to just "ok". If this was my only camera I would be worried. True I am splitting hairs but still. Those hairs were split mainly by the S2 itself. In my opinion it would be better to carry something like an A-series Canon for wide-angle daytime shots and an SP500 or FZ5 for zoom shots or night shots, than to buy and carry this camera alone. It makes perfect sense to carry a small A-frame if you are going to carry this one. It would be like leaving your wallet at home because you have a backpack. It just makes the point clear, for 85%+ of the shots that I take, an A-frame would be a better carry. At least I don't have to worry about the lens cap coming off, plus the sensor is bigger if I got an A610-640. All I would lose is the IS. However, having said that, I know that an S2 takes better photos under ALL conditions than an A700 or A710. Those cameras have some minor color bleeding that the s2 just does not have. But, again, you'd only see that if you go poking around at the image with a magnifying glass, and for most shots the A700 would be effectively just as good and much easier to carry and to use than the s2. Not as good as the s2, no. Effectively just as good, probably. That is it's main flaw. It's a good camera. But it's not great, and it's not that much better than an average camera, and only under certain shooting conditions, and only for certain types of shots, will its size and bulk pay off. Just think of how many people have gotten along for how long without ever laying hands on an s2.

I hope that I have said enough, because it seems that there will be little more said, in any case :) shoot it at ISO50 and superfine mode if at all possible...

And the full-size shot downsampled to 640x480 from 5MP.

You can see how small, relatively speaking, the effect is of shooting at higher ISO. But what you gain in shutter speed you lose in fine detail, and it is like adding a thin layer of slime over the photo. Not bad at small sizes, but still. I like my shots to be clean. And yet another example of how much better this camera is than the A700 not EVEN to mention the Nikon S4.

er, response #48 are crops from a iso 50, 100 and 200 series.

not easy to tell the difference even up close, is it?

but you can really see it "overall" the shots just don't look as crisp and clear.

here is an example of where the s2 is "easy lovin" and the fz5 is "tough lovin". These are 640x480 crops of 5MP wide angle shots at full 12x optical zoom, two shots of the same subject (with some small changes due to the different days) but both at the lowest ISO and both at EV0. FZ5 iso80 1-400 f5 standard mode fine res, s2 iso50 1-125 f5 superfine with the contrast down a notch (and in standard mode the fz5 has the sharpness and saturation down a notch). IS on with both. IS is very, very very useful :) saved my bacon right here with the s2. And the fz5 of course very sensitive to camera shake at full zoom. Also I sharpened both shots manually, the same amount. Anyway you can see right here what the game is between the two. The s2 at almost half the ISO and about a third of the speed gives a brighter, punchier shot which clearly has better image processing and in fact looks less fuzzy (plus you can clearly see the price that you pay with the fz5 in terms of loss of fine detail even at ISO80). But look at the line edges and coloring of the fz5 shot. The overall optical quality is better with the fz5 shot, even if there are specific *image* qualities that are better with the s2. Now, one more thing. These are 100% crops of 5MP shots. If you look at the full 5MP shot what you see with the Fz5 shot is a darker shot with more "severe" coloring but very clean lines, and the s2 shot is lighter and more colorful but it looks like it's been soaked in water for 5 minutes. How much of that is due to the low shutter-speed? I doubt any of it. I would say that without a doubt, given some gamma enhancement or some sort of lightening and a little noise-scrubbing, the FZ5 shot looks better than the S2 shot. It is only at high res when pixel-peeping that you can see the extra fine-detail in the s2 shot and you can see the noise and graininess of the FZ5 shot (and the same goes for the Canon A700, the two are quite similar in terms of image quality). I mean, really. The less detail in the shot (or the closer you are to the subject) and the better the lighting, the more the FZ5 looks better compared to the s2. Cut the light or increase the overall detail and the s2 wins hands-down. But, again, only if you shoot at the lowest ISO! Once you raise the ISO all bets are off. I would bet that you pay a much higher price for shooting at high ISO than you do for shooting normal or fine instead of superfine. And THAT is where these f2.8-f3.6 12x IS stabilized cameras kick butt over the smaller point and shoots with their f2.8-f4.1 3x or even f3-f5 3x lenses, without IS even, and you can imagine what a 35mm full-frame sensor will do compared to the itty-bitty sensor in the s2 and fz5. What is killing them is the low signal to noise ratio and the higher NR. In exchange you get a slightly smaller and much cheaper camera than a DSLR. But, really, the FZ5 is a much better image-quality vs size tradeoff than the s2. Even though the s2 certainly has at least as good and usually better image quality than the FZ5. You just have to remember not to ask too much from the FZ5. For most shots its just fine. For a few shots, wide-angle long-range landscape shots, you really will want an s2. At least. If not a DSLR. And for a few others, under high zoom, because of the superior lens optical quality and geometric fidelity, you will want the FZ5 *instead* of the s2. But there is no doubt that these two cameras will produce significantly different photos of the same subject. The thing is, sometimes that's good for the fz5, and sometimes that's good for the s2. In the long run it kinda balances out. The s2 will always take a cleaner, more detailed shot than the fz5...if...it is shot at ISO50. Above that all bets are off. And for long-range wide-angle shooting that cleanliness pays dividends, so about half the time the s2 is better, but when shooting tight on the subject the fz5 is better because of the better lines and the reduced effect of loss of fine-detail. And it is FAR easier to carry and shoot than the s2. You just have to realize, and accept, that some of the FZ5 shots will not look all that great when viewed close-up. So...don't view them from close-up. And for some s2 shots, that trick will not work so well because there is an optical problem not an image-detail problem. You'll say, "great camera, but I wish that it had a better lens". And life will go on. I mean, as good as the s2 is, it is not a G6 or Rebel XTi. It will get overwhelmed and screw up a shot, sooner or later. They all do.

and the fullsize 5MP shots, darker one is the fz5 shot.

oops the crops that I forgot to post from two messages ago
the one with the plane front and center is the s2 shot

last is yet another s2 shot :)

all ISO50 superfine

think that I have it slightly backwards. You want the s2 over the fz5 when low-level fine-detail is really important, as in when you are shooting in really tight on a finely-detailed scene (tight enough to see the fine detail). Otherwise, the straight lines, the optical accuracy that you get from the fz5, win the day. The wider the shot and the lower the scene contrast and fine detail, the more discernable lines and curves, the better the fz5 looks compared to the s2. It sure as hell doesn't always look worse than the s2. Optically the FZ5 is better, but it has much stronger NR, in exchange. That is not a problem if there is not much "fine detail" to be seen in the first place, then you can't see how badly it is being scrubbed out. Doesn't mean that this is not a problem at all with the s2, though, and, trust me, it is a problem with the s2. The nightmare for the s2 owner is when they take a shot that is wide-angle enough and far enough away from the subject where they can't see any fine detail, really, and there isn't a lot of color in it, but they can see all the optical distortion from the lens. Anything shot near or after dusk, or shooting towards the sun into shade, for example. Anything below "brown", or dark "chalk", all that soft-shaded light detail, the s2 will sort of lightly blend away. Admittedly the FZ5 will totally smudge it out, but at least what is left will be clean and have good lines :)

...I have to admit that I am sick and tired of dealing with the lens cap of this camera. It is like a wild child, you never quite know where it is and where it's going to go and you always have to keep a hand on it when you take the camera in and out of the bag. That is a serious pain in the butt, in and of itself.

But I'm not quite yet ready to throw it away and just trust the bag lining. Not quite.

But it does take some beautiful photos, especially when they aren't looked at too closely and the lack of low-level fine detail isn't obvious. Really nice grain and tone. Color balance is a little "red", but it can be very appealing and there is no question that this camera is sharp.

I'm also liking the A610 that I bought this weekend.

hm, how about a full 12x zoom iso50 autobracket sample for you...with the ev0 shot at 1/70s, ev+0.7 at 1/30s...handheld. In the freaking 40F cold and wind. I was floored. I even more impressed than before. I still see a little "chalking" but no "watercoloring" and there definitely is a lot of sharpness in the output from this camera. Probably a little too much. I turned the contrast down a notch, time for the sharpness to come down a notch too. I cannot tell you how much better the jpeg output of this camera is than the RAW output from my SP500. Cleaner, sharper, better colors...I have yet to match it with the CS2 raw converter. Though the raw output is a little cleaner, optically, with none of that "chalky" overprocessing that I see in jpeg files from the sp500 and to a lesser extent from the s2. Oh, have I said this before, the FZ5 reaches its limits much sooner. It may have better IS but the FZ5 gets very chalky when the s2 is chugging right along.

ok, to cross-pollinate...I've been playing a lot with Photoshop CS2 and the HSV settings in Lviewpro...what this camera, the FZ5, seems to do and do often, during the day, is overexpose, significantly. My SP500 overexposes too but not so much, and of course the S2 least of all. The thing is though that the s2 seems to be a bit "fluty" with the images, like its too fancy, just a bit too much image processing...there's a definite reddish-brown shift to the shots from both cameras, but with the s2 it is a lighter "bronze" vs the FZ5s orange-brown, and no doubt the image lines are less "processed" and more subdued and straighter with the FZ5. It has more grit and grain than the s2 but the image lines are cleaner. No doubt on some shots the FZ5 crashes and shows its limits, mainly on shots with a lot of contrast, with really wide dynamic range. Partially because it significantly overexposes, partially because the noise-reduction threshold is a little higher than with the S2. But this happens on maybe 1% of the shots, and a lot less if you auto-bracket. In any case, 9 times out of ten, dropping the value or brightness setting until the lowlights are just above black and you can still see some detail in them, then bumping the contrast up a little and then sharpening turns an average-looking FZ5 shot into a shot that looks pretty nice. There is the occasional FUBAR shot, and no doubt it needs to be kept under control (overexposing means that it shoots slow) but all in all this camera is actually pretty decent. Not great, I would never say that (even if there wasn't any lens flare). But not bad. For example, it has very reliable focus, something that shouldn't be taken for granted. It is very clean even at ISO400. It really struts its stuff in moderate to low light, shots with moderate contrast. Paradoxically. But it does tend to screw around with the exposure a little too much, and almost demands that you use auto-bracketing. The S2 is almost so accurate in its metering that autobracketing really only helps with the occasional high contrast shot. But I think the fundamental image geometry is better with the FZ5. The lines are just crisper, cleaner, more subtle...not overstated. Like the difference between a trumpet and a coronet. Though no doubt it has heavy NR and occasionally you will pay the price for that in terms of smudged fine detail and narrow dynamic range.

Again, this camera has some issues. But it is reliable, fast, easy to use, has a good viewfinder, takes decent pictures that at worst require a little post-processing, and works well in low light. Not to mention light and small with a 12x zoom. In contrast the s2 shots require little if any PP once the exposure is right but you pay the price with a big, heavy bulky camera with a crappy lens cap and a viewfinder that is average at best, under zoom the images begin to look a little flaky and it gets noisy at ISO200 and real noisy at ISO400. They're almost polar opposites. You will get better photos, in the main sense, with the s2, but you will hate it, unless you come from the DSLR world where the S2 is a small light little camera. You're still going to hate the lens cap though. I actually like shooting with my A610 better, and now I want to buy an A710 (with IS)...for this very reason. The quality of the shots that I get from the s2 are just not worth the bulk and that damm lens cap. Even if they *are* good. And...they are pretty good. But my A610 can shoot right with it, image-quality wise, and it would be even better if it had IS. Not to mention a 6x zoom and IS. It does get a little fiddly though as I have to change the exposure manually, and none of the A-series Canons have auto-bracketing anyway. 9 times out of 10 the s2 is too much camera and too much trouble for what it gives you. It is like carrying a 30-06 with a 10x scope to go squirrel-hunting.

...would I sell my s2? No.

Would I buy another one, if I broke this one? Maybe.

Would I pay $375 for one again? No. Not to mention that I bought it on rep after initially deciding not to get it because I didn't like the ergonomics. Its strengths are the image quality at ISO50 and maybe ISO100 and the IS and the 12x zoom plus it has a few useful features that the A-series Canons don't have. That's it. The viewfinder *BITES*. The lens cap is a joke, it needs to clip in or on, period. Panasonic can deal with this, why can't Canon. Also I want to be able to read the ISO in nice big letters like with the s3. And I like the s3s color scheme better. But the s3 has more noise and less sensitivity.

It's too nice a camera to sell but not nice enough and too big, both, for me to be really satisfied with it. Even given the image quality it really does beg the question of whether it is better than an A-series camera, and if so, how often and for what shots. Clearly you'd lose the 12x zoom but really if you don't need 12x zoom...if you don't need a 420mm equivalent, that's a lot to carry around that you won't need. And if you really do "need" it, then you probably want something faster than F3.6. not to mention lower noise. It is just just on the threshold of too big and too much trouble for what it gives you. I mean, hell, even an A410 takes decent photos and look at that little thumb-sized camera that Canon has now, the SD40. 7MP, 3x zoom, SDHD..and it's like 4 inches long and an inch high. Then they have the A710IS and the SD700IS...these are decent cameras. I don't need a freaking D40 or Rebel XTi that fits in my pocket. All I really want is an A610-A630 with IS. Don't need 10MP, don't need SDHD...would be nice but it's 2 years out...I do want the IS now. But hey, not at $300+. That was the big mistake that I made with this camera, I could have bought it for almost half price 6 months later, and, likewise, I will probably pick up an A710is when it comes down to $200 or so. Then I'm done. And this is the thing. The photos from an s2 are not twice as good as the photos from my a610. But the camera is twice as big and twice as heavy. The *maximum zoom* is 3x better, yes. The *images* are not. The s2 is the biggest and heaviest camera that I own, with the worst EVF. But only for a rare set of images can I say that it is actually "the best". Though admittedly that set exists. None of my other cameras can beat it in terms of overall image quality for general shooting. But they're not, like, "miles behind", either. And remember, you have to carry the damm thing, and you have to actually want to use it, to take those good shots. That's why I am very glad that it is not the only camera that I have. The times that I *do* carry it and shoot it are infrequent enough to make it an enjoyable and "different" experience, and the results that I get from my other cameras are good enough to let me know that I don't need to carry an s2 all the time to take good shots. But I wouldn't sell it.

ok, let's tidy up a little, as you know that I couldn't have quit playing around with these after a year :)

First, the raw vs jpeg issue. I figured out the Adobe CS2 raw converter (it helps to shoot raw and jpeg simultaneously) and now I can get my raw shots to look better than jpegs for one reason and one main reason. The optical distortion due to the in-camera sharpening, and the loss of detail due to the in camera noise reduction. They almost always hammer the chroma noise too much. It is not true that all the image detail is in the luminance signal. If you eliminate *all* the chroma noise then the color signal loses too much color resolution. You get clean, flat, "slab" looking shots but the fine detail is gone. RAW takes care of that. Then you just have to sharpen the hell out of them, and to do that, you have to filter them a little or else you get big blocks of noise. It's a tradeoff. RAW really only works well when there is a lot of detail and a lot of light, or, you are trying to avoid the first prblem. The first problem is a systemic problem in the camera...you can see it here in these shots. One shot is an Fz5 shot with "natural" setting (ie the sharpness and saturation are down low) and the other is an Fz5 shot with normal setting and the third is an s2 shot with the sharpness down. You can see what I was talking about earlier about the zoom shots and the optical distortion at full zoom, but note, with the fz5 in natural mode, that optical distortion is not there...it looks nice and clean, and yes boys and girls the image sharpens up nicely (I posted the sharpened version just to make the point). The only problem with it then is the NR, no doubt the NR is stronger on the fz5 than on the s2 so the lowlights are a little darker on the fz5 than on the s2, but not by much...given the right exposure (which can be had easily with auto-bracketing), the fz5 is, optically, hard to beat. Certainly it beats the s2 in terms of image linearity and optical resolution. The colors are a different story, but hey you can't have everything in life all the time.

Now I am working on an adapter to fit the s2s' lens adapter, that can handle a locking lens cap. If I don't sell it and get an A710. Since the two are so very similar in terms of image quality and the a710 is much smaller and lighter plus it has 7MP and SDHD support with 3:2 mode....and at full zoom, the s2 gets soft and wobbly. All of this is nothing to sneeze at.

If you see a bunch of S2s and s3s hitting ebay in the next few months, you will know why :) and I predict that the s2 will get real cheap real fast as the a710 brings most of its features to the table at a much smaller size and about the same price point. Plus some bonus features the s2 can't deliver. You lose the flip LCD and you lose the 12x zoom but 6x is enough for most shots and you really don't need the flip screen if you can shoot handheld. The big loss is the autobracketing and the customization features, but you trade them for a small, light camera....and for the big finale...a camera without a lens cap. That truly fits in your pocket. Not to mention SDHD, which will be de rigeur in a few years. Hell, I use my 2GB cards all the time. I have 3 postage stamps that carry a total of 5GB of data. Amazing. One cost me $110, the other cost me $100, and the third cost me $30. You can't beat that with a stick.

In a year Canon will have trouble giving s2s and s3s away. And in two years your average cellphone will replace the a710. Of course, if they can't last more than a year, something might replace the average cellphone :)

this may help, here's the fz5 in standard mode...with the sharpness and saturation at normal.

vs the s2 with the sharpness at -1, again.

and the fz5 in standard mode. Take my word on it that all these shots can be sharpened and guess which one looks the best afterwards.

last two...

more brain teasers :) one of these is an sp500 shot. 100% crop.

Anyway now you know why the s2 is not so great when shooting at high zoom. Especially at night when the extra NR kicks in.

Just to make it clear the shots (from the last 3 replies) with the snow in them, are the fz5 in standard mode (with the sharpness at normal).

the heavily sharpened shots are the fz5 in natural mode (with the sharpness down) after heavy sharpening. The very last one is an sp500 shot. The other two are s2 shots with the sharpening at -1.

all of these are at full zoom, lowest iso possible, IS continuous. They are all 1-640s or better, f4 or better, 100% crops at 640x480 from 5MP or 6MP shots.

at the highest image quality possible from each camera, short of shooting raw in the sp500.

Let me make it as clear as possible :)

...the first shot in r60 or so (three above this one) is the s2 in c-1 s-1 custom setting (as opposed to low sharpening or neutral). The second one is the fz5 in normal mode, the 3rd is the fz5 in "natural" mode (with the sharpness down). The second one in the next reply is the sp500 jpeg sharpness at 0 (not -5 or +5). I am not sure exactly what the first one in the second reply is either the s2 shot sharpened or the fz5 natural mode shot sharpened. I don't have it open right here but you can tell because the tone of the s2 shot, notably the green siding, is a little softer and brighter than the tone of the fz5 shot, and the dark lines are darker with the fz5 than with the s2. The contrast is greater. What I am going to put up here now is a raw sp500 shot slightly sharpened. Just to make the point...there is some distortion in the s2 shot under full zoom, and also it is a little soft. It is *very* soft to the upper left of center (assuming a good focus and steady hold, of course). Neither the sp500 or the fz5 have this softness problem to this degree, certainly not in raw mode, and certainly not in the fz5. But one has to shoot the fz5 in natural mode to avoid the optical distortion at full zoom, that is visible in reply#60 or so (see the beginning of this reply). In other words, the s2 does give you a 12x zoom (a true 35-420mm zoom) but it is not all that sharp at or near full zoom and it shoots much sharper wide-angle. When I first saw this I thought it was due to the F# going up (since I shot it at F6.5 at first, to maximize the DOF) but no, it's just a "feature" of the lens. This has been documented at imaging-resource and it's been noted at dpreview. It's a good enough lens if you don't look at it too closely, but it certainly is not a sharp lens out at the telephoto end. It also shows up at night pretty quickly when zooming out, this is exacerbated by the extra NR over 1.3s. Anyway this is all just what I've seen, by now who is really reading these reviews anyway, not for the s2. And to compare, these are raw mode sp500 shots with a jpeg taken at the same time, and the full-size shot for your enjoyment. Note there is no optical distortion in the raw shot at all, but there is some color noise.

Here are, specifically, the s2 crops. Apologies. I'm pretty sure the first one in the response above is the s2 crop. But anyway these 3 are definitely s2 crops. Again with the softness and contrast down. So, I bought an a710 this weekend and while it does have some chroma noise as well as noticeable luminance noise at ISO800, it is just about what I want. Small, light, quiet, fast, powerful and not very expensive. With some future-proofing in the SDHD, shoots AAs and has the 6x zoom and IS. Plus basically good image quality especially ISO80-400. It is faster at the same ISO than my s2 (and half as fast at the same ISO as my a610) but in playing around with slow handheld shooting I discovered that I can get good shots out of the s2 at 1s exposures, but only 1-4s to 1-8s min with the a710. The a610 pretty-much needs 1-15s and up. Of course you can get a decent shot that looks ok on the camera LCD at under 1-10s with the a610, but looking at it on the computer monitor reveals obvious handshake. Likewise 1sec exposures with the a710 look ok on the camera but they are not stable. To play this game you have to know the limits of your camera and also get familiar with the custom timer.

Anyway I suspect that the s2 is more stable than the a710 due to the much higher mass and rotational inertia...but that is exactly what makes it such a PITA to carry. No question the lens is faster but that advantage only shows up at dusk, and then only for maybe half an hour as the sun goes down. You're not going to shoot at full zoom handheld in the dark, even with IS. I think that for general walkaround stuff, carrying both an s2 and an a710 is a good deal, they use the same cards, same batteries, one fits in your jacket pocket and the other needs a carry bag. If you need the 12x zoom there it is, but most of the time the a710 is enough camera. The IS gives it an extra utility edge over the a610, means that you don't have to use a rest at night, but of course you always can use a rest if you want to shoot ISO80. That combination makes it less likely that you will drop the s2...and if you get tired of carrying it and rarely using it, just put it on ebay. I bet that there will be a lot of s2s on ebay very soon now that Canon is putting IS on most of their new cameras. The more s2s on ebay, the less likely I am to get a decent price for *my* s2, and the more sense it makes for me to keep it even if I rarely carry it now (not like that wasn't a problem already, with 3 other cameras, now 4, not to mention the issue you see in these attached shots). Good luck and have fun.

ps pricegrabber is amazing...I didn't know that Nikon makes a Coolpix S2...of course it is a slim-profile shirt-pocket camera...it has to have completely-different performance characteristics. But I wonder how many owners complain that the image quality isn't good enough, and go out and buy an Canon s2?

...I don't think it's a question. Do you see the blotches and distortions in the s2 shots? Under zoom, in natural mode, the FZ5 is better. More accurate, less NR...cleaner lines...even with the sharpness down on the s2. It's still oversharpened, probably to make up for the extra NR.

regarding the replies #59-62 and so forth, the "brain teasers" were too hard. To clarify: the s2 shots are the ones that are kinda light and fluffy with a little distortion in the lines and patchiness in the colors. With noticable NR smoothing. Generally washed-out colors. I shot it with the contrast and the saturation both down a notch. The fz5 shot in standard mode was much harder, with more contrast and saturation, and more distorted. The fz5 shot in natural mode was not quite so hard, had almost no linear distortion but still a touch of NR softness. And was in general a lot softer than the others, because in natural mode both the saturation and the contrast are minimizaed. The sp500 shot was in the middle and the raw sp500 shot had almost no NR softening, almost no linear distortion (like the fz5 in standard mode), they have some color grain, but they have a whole lot of detail that the NR usually takes out.

But you really can't see that detail unless you're looking at the shots at 100%. Not to mention a 5MP shot on a 2MP monitor. What you can see, even under those conditions, what you will always be able to see, given a severe-enough shot (these are 12x zoom shots, the same goes for wide-angle landscape shots at long focus lengths) is the linear distortion. You can usually see the NR smoothing effect with large, complex objects, like the side of a house or builidng. Long lines, flat areas with texture that are a significant part of the whole shot. At 100% these flaws are obvious and often ugly. And to me this is really the best way to determine the quality of a camera, given decent exposure, focus and coloration. My eye can kind of "sense" these distortions at 2MP and so forth. But I can really only *identify* them at 50% to 100%. That's why a lot of cameras like the Nikon s4 and Panasonic TZ1 can get away with below-average image quality...because at low resolutions (or when viewing the image from far away) you can't really identify the flaws. But they are obvious at close-up, at high resolutions, and in prints. Printing generally magnifies these flaws because printers are much higher resolution devices than displays. My 15" diagonal 2MP monitor has 1200 pixels in 9 inches, horizontally. That is, at best, just over 120 pixels per inch. Really it's 60dpi. You can get a $200 color printer that will do 3200dpi, taking your cameras' image flaws and blowing them up by a factor of 600.

So to me you want to find a camera that can at least take a good, clean shot when viewed on a 2MP monitor, look at the shots at 100% and see if they have a few flaws or a lot of flaws...again you need to know what is a flaw and what isn't a flaw...what's a big flaw and what's a small flaw...then buy a camera that might have a few minor flaws (like, the s2 has a few minor flaws) and then you will be happy with it when viewing the shots at 2MP. Even mostly when printing. If you make your decisions at 1MP or 640x480, you are asking for trouble when you want to view at 2MP, not to mention when viewing at 100% or when printing. The s2 is ok at 2MP, maybe even a 5MP print. It isn't a DLSR. The problem is, most people don't need DSLRs. They just need a decent 2MP camera. And in *that* sense, the s2 is overkill. The s2 is a good entry-level professional camera that is much more than most amateurs need but still not really enough for a pro. And it certainly is not perfect. The focus system alone is archaic, the lens cap would make a pro cry and a weekender howl. The image is ok. Not bad. Not all that great either. The feature set, likewise, the s3 is better but still doesn't have SDHD. This camera is ready for a significant upgrade, just to hold water in the overall sense.
But as it is, it is not going to really hurt you. If the size, weight, and lens cap is not a problem for you.

I SHOT IT WITH THE CONTRAST AND SHARPNESS DOWN A NOTCH. Not the saturation.

Even then the sharpness is too high.

It is always better to undersharpen in the camera and get clean lines in the jpeg (especially when the camera can't shoot raw and shooting raw is out of the picture, so to speak) and then sharpen up in post-processing. Where you can use a variety of sharpening filters and filter intensities. The camera really only gives you 3 choices for the sharpening setting, all of which are too hard especially for zoom shooting. As you can generally use more sharpening with wide-angle shots, the s2 looks real good shooting wide-angle and not so hot shooting zoom. By contrast the FZ5 (in natural mode) looks good shooting zoom but not so hot shooting wide-angle...in standard mode it looks great shooting wide-angle but there is way too much sharpness when shooting zoom. Overall I'd rather shoot the fz5 in natural mode, then sharpen up in post-processing. I can't fix the s2 zoom shots. It does however have a better color balance than the fz5. But the zoom shots look "overheated" and it is noisy at high ISO. The fz5 by contrast looks butter soft in natural mode and the colors always look a little wrong. Like it works in 16-bit color, not 24 bit, then saves out in 24-bit color. A lot of this happens because it almost never gets the exposure right, but some of this is because the color balance is a little off. With all of these cameras, anytime there is a moderate to high level of contrast in the shot, autobracketing (and some layering and EV-mixing) is necessary to get a really good image. The cameras are just not smart enough to get the exposure exactly right, and the intensity-response curves are not perfect either. Then you have optical distortion to contend with, color and luminance noise and NR...trust me...anyone who thinks the s2 is a really great camera, doesn't know what a really great camera is, or can do. But it is certainly not a *bad* camera. Not at all.

even if you do have to manually set up the autobracketing each time on the FZ5, this is offset by the fact that it is easier to change the exposure than with the s2. Just the touch of a button does it, with the s2 you have to pull up the function menu then find the exposure entry to change it. There is no dedicated button for this like on the A series Canons. Even so the s2 is pull it out, turn it on, and shoot. The autobracketing is a setup entry, it stays the same through power cycles, and the turn on and lens-extension speeds are much faster than the FZ5. Plus the buttons are better-placed (they fixed this in the FZ7) This gives the s2 a light-footedness and ease of use that is hidden by its size and weight, like Clark Kent hides Superman. Still he needs that phone booth. The S2 is still big and heavy, and its lens cap does have a mind of its own. But...what they both need, really, is a 28-320mm zoom, not a 35-420mm zoom. There simply is hardly any need for a 12x zoom on a 35mm camera, and a lot of times I am walking around with these cameras and simply pining for a 28mm lens. With a 35mm lens, you really can only shoot half, maybe a third, of the normal human FOV. That means that I see a shot, and I have to either walk back another 20yards or more, or I have to not zoom in so that I can get the whole shot. It's easy to have to compromise between getting good detail and getting a large enough FOV. Very easy to overzoom with these cameras, not to mention the 4:3 without a 16:9 or even a 3:2 mode. But, I mean, this is really splitting ant-hairs. Still, if you want a shot and the reason you have a camera is to take shots of scenes that you want to preserve, why would you want a camera that doesn't see things the same way that you do? The camera should at least *start* with around 80% of the normal human FOV then zoom in from there. And frankly I'm tired of shooting 4:3. It just doesn't look natural, there is either too much sky and foreground and the image detail is too small, or there is no FOV. It only works well under high zoom or with a large DOF shot, or, I have to shoot wide and at high res all the time, then crop later. The trend then is to shoot 10MP superfine 35mm all the time just to get the FOV then go in and cut out the sky and foreground and part of the FOV, to make a 16:9 shot at 2MP. No wonder in-camera cropping is such a big deal nowadays. The thing I have to say about the FZ7 and the S3 is that they have more of the features that I want in the FZ5 and S2, but I hate the viewfinder location in the FZ7 (plus it has even more noise and NR than the FZ5) and the S3 just isn't that much better than the s2 that I'd want to buy an S3, plus it has more chroma noise and the ISO speeds are overrated. The problem is that the sensors aren't getting any better, in terms of signal to noise, they're just getting more pixels. But the image quality itself is decreasing. It's like the difference between Britney Spears at 16 with no kids and a first recording contract, and Britney Spears at 25 with two kids and millions in the bank. Neither one is what you want and the second is hardly going to make you happy, even if it has some good features. I want Britney at 30 with no kids and the millions in the bank :)
I want a larger sensor with about the same number of MP and a much better signal to noise ratio but with the same-size body and lens, even if I have to compromise on the long-end of the zoom. Make it 28-200, even. With IS and a sensor with 10x the SNR. And with autobracketing, 16:9 (skip 3:2, who needs it) and a good burst mode. What I want, basically, is an a610 or even G6 with autobracketing, a 28-200mm IS lens and a 16:9 mode. I can take the 4x zoom but I can't take the lack of IS. It's like giving up night sights on a pistol. You can still shoot it at night but it is much harder to get a good shot. Instead Canon gives us the A710 and G7 with 35-200mm lenses and more pixels, the S3 with more pixels, and Panasonic does the same with the FZ7 and FZ8. The problem is that there are only a handful of companies that make the SENSORS. Everyone else is left to differentiate on *features*. I want a better, bigger sensor, better lens and slightly more features than my FZ5 has. Not a worse sensor, smaller, worse lens and a lot more features. I don't want to take pictures with a cameraphone...but that is the way the market is heading. And that is another reason that I am hanging onto the cameras that I have right now. They will get worse, not better. Though I might break down and buy an EOS 350 before it is all said and done. I'm not going to buy a D40 without autobracketing, and I'm not going to buy anything any bigger than it needs to be. The Sony A-DSLR looks interesting because it raises the possibility of buying a bunch of old Minolta lenses without IS but the Canon CMOS sensor is the best. If you go with a D40 or D40x you might as well just use an FZ5 or S2. Sure, it has better high ISO performance, but the camera is 3 times bigger! The D40 is huge compared to even my S2. How are you going to carry a D40 (or any DSLR) around and keep it from being broken or stolen? I can't even imagine that. I'm in the middle of a crowd of people in DC, the other day, holding my s2 in my hands, and a guy tried to snatch it right out of my hands and run off with it. Why? Because it was so big and shiny, he thought that it would be worth some real money even if stolen, and he thought that because it was so big, he could just grab it and run. He actually tried. He walked in front of me from behind, then quickly tried to turn around, grab it and turn back and run. I didn't even realize what he was trying to do until hours later, it never occurred to me that someone would try to snatch it out of my hands in broad daylight on a DC city street, especially not in the part of DC that I was in, with people all around us. In Manhattan, yes; in DC, no, and the same thing happened in Manhattan on 18th street in the Village with a smaller camera, I'm walking down the street holding an A700 in my hand and two guys tried to follow me unawares and snatch it from behind. Yes, these guys are dumb-asses who think they are slick, but they were bold dumb-asses and that is what you would have to deal with all the time, not to mention the idiots who bump into you or your camera or act as if it is a playtoy, and the guys who actually are good thieves. Go buy a big new $600 camera that any moron can sell for $150 in a pawnshop anywhere across the country, that would break in half if you drop it or it gets bumped, and see how long you can carry it around, keep it in one piece and stay sane. You carry it, you're a walking target. Gonna have great high ISO performance, though. Ironic that high ISO performance is most useful in the dark, making it much easier for someone to surprise you and steal it. And if a kid will kill you for your iPod, imagine what they would do for your $600 camera. Especially if they thought that it was worth a lot more, as DSLRs usually are. The problem with a very nice camera is that you can't just freely walk around with it, so you are not likely to have it when you see that shot for which you want to carry it. The bigger and more expensive it is, the less likely you are to have it on you, and the more likely it is to get stolen or broken when you do carry it.
Still it would be nice to have a 350D. Even if I rarely carry it around with me. I would like to have one just for that odd shot of the sunset, night sky, etc that I want to take with a really good camera and lens. On a tripod, etc. I'd never carry it while walking around in the city, but it could stay in my car.

The problem, of course, is that my S2 or FZ5 could take most of the same shots just fine. Not to mention my A710 or A610. I'll leave the sp500 out of this discussion for now. I would have to "rent" a 350D for a couple of weeks just to see the difference. But for now I am happy with my FZ5. The rest are superfluous.

Some night shooting I've done with it lately...it can definitely take some good handheld night shots, at ISO200 or even 100 if you're good with the custom timer. The shot is not entirely stable but good enough for 2MP viewing. I don't shoot this camera much, anymore, especially since I got my A610. I mean, you can't use the 12x zoom after it gets so dark, especially handheld, and the A610 has more fine detail and is a much better wide-angle camera. Dragging this sucker out of the house and dealing with the size and lens cap just doesn't appeal to me, any more. But, I mean, this shot is screaming for a DSLR. Shooting at dusk is a job for a real camera, not an etch-a-sketch on steroids. But you're not going to take this with an A610 handheld. The point is, though, if you have a tripod, the A610 is just fine for this. The point is, trying to shoot handheld at night without a tripod will cost you a lot of money. This is 1-5th sec ISO200 -1.3EV

handheld night shot ISO400, 1-2 sec exposure, -2.0EV.

...just a *little* noise. Nice color, though. If you're going to shoot this at ISO400 you have to be careful not to overexpose, as any light part of the shot will get filled with chroma noise.

I got this shot at ISO200 with a 0.3s exposure, handheld, -2.0EV and at ISO400 -0.7EV, 1s handheld.
Yes, out of a bunch of shots, shooting handheld with auto-bracketing and varying the EV all over the place, I got 1 good one and 2 decent ones, at least for remote viewing.

I mean, shoot that shot with a tripod and you'll be fine.

It'll be a little soft compared to usual, due to the long-exposure NR, but still. Quite usable, good colors even at night.

It seems that this camera reaches a point of maximum instability around 1-2 sec and then from there down to 1 s actually gets *more* stable. I get a lot of 1s shots with this camera that come out great, all things considered. It rewards your willingness to be patient, take chances and try a range of different ISO-exposure combinations.

Here's a shot made much easier by the s2's flip LCD but still even at ISO50 1-1000s f5 you can see that it isn't all that great. Not really the sort of shot that you would want to shoot with an s2 or a midbody, in general, instead of with a DSLR. Grainy and low-resolution even at ISO50. It's a very useable camera, easy to use, provides a lot of support, but it doesn't take great photos. Just decent ones. The farther away you get from your subject, the easier it is to see this. Even worse I had to downsample this to fit it on pricegrabber, so there's additional graininess from that. But this is the sort of shooting that I do. It's much better for close-up work in good light. But any camera can do that well.

the thing is, normally, overexposing is what you want to do, to reduce noise at night (increase the signal to noise ratio) but this thing has so much noise at high ISO that it therefore requires dramatic overexposure to mask the noise...to levels that ruin the shot. At any exposure that you would want to use, at ISO400, the noise will dominate the shot. With my FZ5 this is not a problem...with my new Rebel XTi, it is not even an issue. Plus the FZ5 has a much better lens than the s2, and a lot less sharpening (which distorts fine detail especially at high zoom). Still the s2 has very nice color (while the FZ5 requires a bit of salt and sharpening to enjoy the images) and a flip LCD and keeps the AEB settings through a power cycle, and, at ISO50, ignoring the lens cap, it is quite decent. It's not a bad camera to have. But it is not a great camera. Physically it is almost everything that you want. The image quality cannot match what you hold in your hands. It will tease you relentlessly until you buy a DSLR. I've had this camera for 18 months, bought 4 other cameras that are all smaller and at least as good, and still, wanting desperately to get rid of noise and image grain at any ISO over 100, just now plunked down $800 for a Rebel XTi. With 5 other cameras on my shelf, all much smaller than the Rebel and many with a much longer zoom...today, I decided to keep the Rebel. It is just too clean and too easy to use and shoot, and the color is too nice, to take it back. Plus I like the wide-angle kit lens. Enough said.

having said that, Neat Image does a decent job with the ISO400 files, given a S2 profile, but still the fine detail takes a hit.

yes, so if there isn't a lot of fine detail in the original shot, and you shoot ISO400, it can save the shot, but if there is a lot of fine detail, using NI will just blur the shot. The more fine detail in the shot, the less that you will like the results of using a noise-reduction program on it. And this camera is far and away the most noisy at ISO400, compared to my FZ5 and SP500. They look virtually noise-free compared to it, as long as they are shot near EV0. So it's a double problem...you want to lower the EV to gain speed, and use a higher ISO to gain speed, but using the higher ISO costs you both noise and resolution (because the camera is going to clean up the shot regardless) and the lower EV reduces the signal to noise ratio. With this camera you can only use that technique effectively when there is very little light, for real, and no overcast or clouds to highlight the noise.

Taking the s2 from wide to zoom, ISO50, low-sharpening mode.

ISO50 tripod shot at the Baltimore Inner Harbor...it does have a neat feature where it will show you the blown highlights, on the LCD, on playback. This is a 5MP shot cropped to 2MP and then downsampled to 640x480. The very same shot taken with the same camera during the day? Half the fine detail is obliterated by noise and NR even at ISO50. Forget about underexposing it even to -0.7EV. The smaller the feature size, the less this camera can handle the shot, it just gets to the point where it will drive you nuts because it is good for medium-range and close-in work but it simply sucks for long-range wide-angle shooting. Unless of course you are shooting at night and then all you really care about are the pretty colors in the shot. Then it's just fine. Don't even ask what this looked like shooting in twilight at ISO200, just imagine brown salt sprinkled all over the shot. Sure, you can Neat-Image it...you can scrub any shot from any camera...but when the fine detail that you want to see is of the same size as the noise, you just eliminate the fine-detail trying to remove the noise.

There is really no way that you can effectively remove noise from this camera at ISO400 and still get a quality shot with a decent level of fine detail, unless the subject is very close to the camera and the exposure is close to 0EV, and your idea of "a quality shot" is 4x6 or smaller. It's much easier starting from ISO200...at ISO400 you will be lucky to correct to the noise levels of ISO200 and not have a smeared shot. An S2 at ISO400 and Neat Image is not the solution.

On the other hand, speaking as an S2 owner and someone who has actually bought a Rebel XTi afterwards, if you really want to impress yourself with your frugality and "wisdom", especially if you tend to shoot everything in sight like I do, simply use this as a "limit"...don't shoot the S2 at ISO400, ever (there literally is no point in that, for mid to long-range shots) and if you like your ISO200 shots, fine. If you don't like them, toss them, and just keep telling yourself that a Rebel is too expensive to buy, too big to carry around, and won't have the same zoom range anyway. Which is basically true. Then carry a mini-tripod around and stay away from anyone with a DSLR. That's what I did for a good year, it worked for me until one day I got caught with too litle light, too small a tripod, no good place to rest my mini-tripod to get the shot that I wanted, too much s2 noise even at ISO200, and just too much that I wanted to shoot, while all around me were, you guessed it, people with DSLRs. But honestly a Rebel alone is not going to decisively beat the S2 and a tripod. You're going to have to get a stabilized lens, for that. A reasonably fast, stabilized lens. So you're talking $700 for the Rebel XTi and another $500 for a decent IS lens. There's no way around it. Big tripods are too much of a pain in the butt to carry around, and small tripods require a lot of compromise in terms of shot position. It pretty much reduces to an A610 and a mini-tripod vs the s2 and a mini-tripod vs the Rebel with an IS lens and a mini-tripod. $200 vs $300 vs $1300, three different levels of size, performance and flexibility. The A610 has the lead on size, the s2 on zoom and value (to be honest, the Rebel without a lens is not worth 3x as much as the s2 with a 36-420mm effective, but the s2 is worth a hell of a lot more than twice the cost of an A610, given the lens), and the Rebel has the lead on outright performance, especially if you don't mind changing lenses now and then, because you can keep buying lenses as long as you have money to buy lenses with. With the S2 all you can do is go out and buy that super ultra-light mega-stiff $1300 carbon-fiber tripod that you've been wanting for 5 years now, but couldn't justify. You can tell your wife that buying it will save you $5k in lenses :)...but with the Rebel, you can buy a couple of lenses maybe an IS lens and a cheap zoom, or a cheap zoom with IS, and a decent tripod from Best Buy, and be happy, as long as you don't mind dropping $2k on it and the lenses, and then a bag to carry it all around. In that context, the A610 is just a fashion accessory. When you cannot carry the Rebel, the a610 will make perfect sense, but still, even then, for $250 more, how can you not buy an S2. It's just too useful. Yes, I know, it sucks as a mid-zoom camera, it sucks even at ISO200, but how else can you get a usable pocket-sized 420mm IS at ISO50 for $250? You just can't, short of an FZ5. One of those two combined with an A610 and a Rebel with an IS lens makes total sense. The best p&s, the best midrange, the best DSLR (in terms of low noise, which for me is the only reason to get a DSLR, and also in terms of value). A good range to have. You can even carry the s2 and the Rebel at the same time, and not feel stupid, as the s2s' main utility then is as a small, cheap, long, IS F4.8 zoom. Or, ok, go ahead and buy and carry a 300mm F4.8 EF-S zoom and see how smart you feel then. I like the s2, except for the fact that half of the images from it suck. The half that don't suck look pretty good, and make me feel good about owning it and carrying it. I guess that it is like a good divorce settlement. There's a lot that I don't like about it, there's a lot that could be better, but it's reasonable to deal with, easy enough to afford and carry around, quite powerful given its size, and in most cases it can get the job done fairly well. As long as you don't look at the shots too closely. You can think of the Canon S2-IS as a mini-DSLR...with performance and image quality that is proportionate with its size relative to a Rebel with a 24-300mm F2.8-4.6 IS zoom lens. That would be a bigger, heavier lens than this, this is actually the 7" long 3.5 pound 28-300mm F3.5-5.6 IS USM lens...and about twice as expensive as this lens...which is a $2300 lens. Or you can get a Rebel and a $600 24-250mm F3.6 IS lens (not made by Canon) that is only 3" long. The S2 does not have even half the performance of the Rebel with either lens...it is 4x as noisy as the Rebel XTi, 4x as slow, with half the image resolution. It is also a third of the price and half the size of the Rebel with the kit lens. But you could buy a decent car for what it would cost you to get the same zoom range at F4.6, with a Rebel. There is no way that you can really equate the two, other than they both take photographs.

...it's one of those things where you start out trying to figure out which one is "better" and then realize that they just can't be compared directly. You can't really compare a Bentley to a Toyota Camry, a Porsche 930 to an Alfa Romeo, a 4-engined speedboat to a 2-person sailboat. An F-16 to a Cessna 180. They're just too different, their capabilities, their costs, their market, the image they project...just too different. The only thing that the Rebel and the S2 have in common is that you can use them to take photographs.

...it's one of those things where you start out trying to figure out which one is "better" and then realize that they just can't be compared directly. You can't really compare a Bentley to a Toyota Camry, a Porsche 930 to an Alfa Romeo, a 4-engined speedboat to a 2-person sailboat. An F-16 to a Cessna 180. They're just too different, their capabilities, their costs, their market, the image they project...just too different. The only thing that the Rebel and the S2 have in common is that you can use them to take photographs.

well, sometimes you *can* compare an F-16 to a Cessna 180.

ok, this is the reason why this S2 is going back onto the eBay from whence it came, this very night...I took these out at the Jersey shore this weekend, very sunny day, a little hazy...but I said, "well, if I keep this Rebel XTi then I will also keep the s2 so that I can have a nice zoom lens with good color, plus all the other features of the s2 that the Rebel doesn't have, without spending another $500+ for a long lens". Well, that did not really work out, here. This is one of the better shots that I took, and in fact I did not want to pull the batteries out of my S2 and put them in my A610, for shots just like this...long-range shots over a wide area, you can't really do that well with a wide-angle lens. You don't really see anything until you shoot at least 100mm effective, certainly not what you see with your eye. You either get the FOV or the feature size, but not both, and to get feature size with a camera you have to shoot fairly tight. This was a shot from the s2 at full zoom, 420mm effective, and I have cropped it in two places to show the problem with the s2. Which is, namely, a lot of optical distortion at high zoom, coupled with a fair amount of noise even at IS050. The distortion comes from simply having too much sharpening. You would think that it would be simple to back off the sharpening at high zoom factors, wouldn't you? But, no. And this was shot in low sharpening mode. And, like I said, this is one of the better ones. Most of them came out with a lot more distortion than this. Anyway, between this and the lens cap, even given the shooting-speed and features of the S2, it simply is not really worth the size and weight. For what I need it for, my FZ5 is a much better camera. And the Rebel simply beats the pants off of it. I just got a nice big, fat 17-85mm F4.0 IS USM lens for it, and now it too can shoot out to 1s exposures handheld...with a decent zoom. The S2 has certainly gotten me a lot of good shots, but I have no further tolerance for its optical distortion. Either due to noise, NR or oversharpening. I have made the jump to better cameras and I am not willing to go back.

So you won't think that I'm just a whiner...here are some of the bad crops...I mean, good Lord...I didn't think that this camera had *that* much distortion at high zoom, but the problem is that when your lens still isn't really long enough, and the feature size is still kinda small, every bit of distortion is magnified. I mean, I will never take this camera out for this type of shooting again, and hopefully I will sell it soon. Which is a shame, as it really is useful for medium to short-range work. This camera with a much better 6x zoom lens and a lot less sharpening (or zoom-dependent sharpening) would be killer. The 12x allows you to see way too many of the deficiencies of the camera. Unless, of course, you are Canon, and you want to sell a lot of expensive DSLRs and lenses. I had the same sort of problem with a Nikon S4 and its 10x zoom...an A700 and its 6x zoom...a TZ1 and its 10x zoom. You really need a good sensor and a good IP engine, to take good shots with those cheap long zooms. The lenses just aren't good enough for it. Anyway, so this camera is done, though I must admit that just last week I got a shot that I had been trying hard to get for a long time, because of the flip LCD, although I could have gotten it with my A610 too, but my A610 just died on me (it must have been pissed that I didn't even shoot it when I was at the Jersey shore this weekend). But this camera is done. I would never have though that it would do this badly on these shots. Boy, did it suck.

I mean, all that sharpening not only distorts the image at high zoom, it makes the image even more noisy and kicks up the size of the noise grain. This camera is a decent camera, but *only* if you shoot tight on your subject. The farther away you get and the more FOV in your shot, the more it sucks. And that is at IS050. ISO100-400 are proportionally worse. But, still. I am talking about "sucking" relative to a good DSLR. It smokes a TZ1 or S4. It will even make an A700/A710 look bad at high zoom. The only midrange that can really compete with it and do better is an FZ5, and then only at mid to high zoom. The SP500 has the same oversharpening problem, coupled with an average lens, but, mercifully, a lot less noise. As well as less speed and no NR. You can keep on shooting with the s2 long after you have to hang it up with an SP500 or even an FZ5. They are good cameras, but clearly Canon has tweaked the ISO rating on the S2. And at "ISO200" and "ISO400" you pay the price for it. Very fast, but very noisy too. Ironically the FZ5 is slower at ISO200 but a lot less noisy and even ISO400 is useful for low-light shooting. If it didn't have a goofy color cast in low light, I would sell the s2 without a second thought. As it is I am selling it with mild regret. But enough playing around with this thing, I have had a love-hate relationship with it for a year. Enough already. It is just *such* a tease. It let me down too many times, too often in too many ways, with the occasional great shot that kept me coming back for more. I ended-up buying a Rebel XTi and a 17-85 F4 IS lens that cost 5x as much, just to be free of it.

I look back through these 80 replies of mine, and I see some very good looking shots. Some of them, though, look great because they are downsampled to 640x480. Some of them look great because the color is so nice in this camera. Not too blue, not too brown, not too flat, not too contrasty. Very natural colors, with a little reddish tint. Owning a $700 Rebel XTi and a $500 IS lens with a quarter of the range of the S2s' lens, I can say that for $350 this camera is a good deal. You just have to be prepared to be utterly disgusted with some of the shots from it. Some you will love, and some...are just a mess. It's like buying cheap wine or dating cheerleaders. If you don't care too much and you enjoy saving money, this is the camera for you. If you *do* care a lot, and you want to save money but still get a powerhouse of a midrange camera, get an FZ5. Trust me. Don't even waste your time with an S2 or anything else. Get an FZ5, get used to it, bond with it, exchange blood vows with it, shoot it in natural mode, get a good post-processing program, learn how to sharpen well, learn to auto exposure-bracket, learn how, when and why to adjust the exposure and levels and contrast in post-processing, get a nice little mini-tripod, and enjoy your FZ5. Don't even think about getting an S2, or S3 or S5. No matter how much you think the FZ5 sucks, it is still better than an S2. Trust me. The S2 is for people who want a camera that will take shots that look good when viewed from large distances (where you cannot see what it has done to the fine detail, where you can't really see all the noise), and who don't want to spend a lot of money for a big zoom and IS.

And if you can't do that, if you can't live with the crappy fine-detail fidelity of the S2 or the color shift and softness of the FZ5 in "natural mode", the Rebel XTi and D40x are waiting for you. I still say the FZ5 is the best deal, all around. A very good, very solid, very capable camera, it just needs some help in post-processing. Help that you just can't give to the S2 because it has already butchered the shot, most likely.

I successfully sold my s2 on eBay for $170! whoo-hooo!

one of the last series of shots that I took with my s2...trust me, there were a *lot* of posts and lightpoles in this shot, but with a few hours worth of postprocessing, I got a presentable result.

(sorry, one of those was a 2MP file the other a 640x480 and I put them both up, didn't I..."d'oh" :)