Canon Powershot S95 review

Canon PowerShot S90 shook up the premium compact camera segment when it launched last year, offering excellent image quality in a very sleek body. It narrowly missed out against the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, but with the S95 Canon is hoping to build on the foundations laid with the S90.

The S95 looks almost identical to the S90, but it’s slightly slimmer and also a bit heavier. Canon has used a new tactile coating on the body to improve handling in the absence of a hand grip and helps to make it feel more secure in your hands. The controls remain familiar and include a shooting mode dial – complete with Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual modes – and a selection ring on the lens barrel.

Improvements over the S90 include a 720p HD movie mode – which records in h.264, but both auto-focus and optical zoom are disabled – and an in-camera HDR scene mode that captures three pictures at different settings and combines them in-camera, which works very well but requires a tripod to avoid ghosting from camera shake and can’t be used to shoot fast-moving objects.

The S95 is also the first PowerShot to include Canon’s Hybrid IS technology, which compensates for both angular and shift camera shake. It’s particularly useful for macro photography, but has uses in other photographic mediums.

Instead of being sensor-based, it’s built into the 4.0x 28-105mm f/2.0-4.9 optical zoom lens, which does unfortunately suffer from some minor barrel distortion throughout its focal range. It’s not a huge issue though as the S95 produces technically good images that are very crisp. There’s very little evidence of chromatic aberration and flare is also very well controlled.

At its heart is a 10 megapixel 1/1.7in CCD sensor that is virtually identical to the S90’s. It’s a High Sensitivity (HS) variety which, combined with the S95’s DiGiC 4 processor and the lens’s large f/2.0 aperture, enables it to perform remarkably well in poor lighting conditions. It can record images in both RAW and JPEG format and supports a range of ISOs from 80 to 3200 in 1/3 stop increments.

It produces very usable images at up to ISO 1600 in both RAW and JPEG, with the RAW files being slightly crisper. Colours do start to shift a little at ISO 1600, but the images are still packed full of detail with minimal banding. Above ISO 1600, photos adopt a very muddy appearance so we’d recommend avoiding higher sensitivities because of this.

Obviously, the S95’s main competitor at the moment is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 and it’s a very close-run contest between the two. The S95’s JPEGs are much cleaner than the LX5’s, but as soon as you shoot in RAW, the two are difficult to tell apart. There’s less barrel distortion on the LX5’s RAW files, so we’d give it a slight edge. What’s more, the LX5’s video mode is much more advanced, allowing auto-focus and zoom during recording – something that the S95 cannot do.

The S95’s benefit is its size though and that’s an area where the Panasonic simply can’t compete. If size is important, the S95 is the way to go because it effortlessly slips into your trouser pocket. At over £300 though, it’s not a camera for everyone, but it is a little cheaper than the LX5. Both are excellent cameras, but we prefer the LX5’s added flexibility over the S95’s size advantage.