Canon PowerShot S120 review

Lots of people want a camera they can slip into a pocket or handbag, which rules out a lot of cameras that excel for image quality. The Canon S120 is an exception, though. It’s just 29mm thick, but with its large sensor and wide-aperture lens, it can capture more light than most compact cameras – a key ingredient for superior image quality. Full manual control, RAW capture and a built-in neutral-density (ND) filter confirm that this is a camera that’s designed for people with high expectations.

SENSOR AND APERTURE

The 1/1.7in sensor is about 50 per cent larger (by surface area) than the 1/2.3in sensors commonly used in most compact cameras, and the same size as is found in various other premium compacts such as the Panasonic LX7. The S120 is significantly slimmer than the LX7, though (29mm compared to 50mm), thanks to a lens that retracts much further into the camera body.

The downside is that its lens isn’t as bright. f/1.8 for wide-angle shots lets in more light than typical compacts with f/3.3 lenses, but not as much as the LX7’s f/1.4 lens. Meanwhile, zooming in causes the aperture to close down to an unremarkable f/5.7. The LX7 is six times brighter with an f/2.3 aperture for telephoto shots. Then again, the S120’s 5x zoom is bigger than the LX7’s 3.8x zoom. Its aperture is also a small improvement over the older Canon PowerShot S110 with its f/2-5.9 lens.

HANDLING

Most of the other changes compared to the S110 are just as subtle. It’s 2mm thicker, 2mm wider and 19g heavier. Battery life is up from 200 to 230 shots – still lower than we’d hope for but a welcome improvement nonetheless. The flash is now a conventional pop-up design rather than a motorised glide-up-glide-down affair.

The 3in screen’s resolution has doubled to 922,000 dots, and it’s now touch-sensitive. This brings a vast improvement to autofocus control – simply tapping the screen moves the autofocus point. When the multi/face detect mode is selected, tapping the screen invokes a tracking autofocus mode.

The touchscreen also speeds up access to the quick-access menu, but it’s disappointing that this menu hasn’t been redesigned to take full advantage of touchscreen control. There are more icons than can fit down the left edge of the screen, so there’s a fair amount of scrolling involved, and specific functions aren’t always in the same place on the screen. A grid of buttons across the screen would have been better.

Otherwise, the controls are virtually identical to the S110’s. The lens ring can be assigned to various functions such as ISO speed, exposure compensation and zoom, or left for the camera to decide based on the selected shooting mode. There’s a rear wheel too, and although it’s slightly fiddly to adjust, on the whole the controls are pretty decent for such a slim camera. There’s no shortage of functions to adjust, including the ability to customise the behaviour of the Auto ISO mode.

We’re normally not too fussed about scene presets, but we like the new Star presets. One of them used exposure times of around 15 seconds at ISO 800 to capture impressively detailed photos of the night sky. Another combined dozens of exposures over the space of an hour, capturing stars as concentric circles as the Earth rotated.

An hour of multiple exposures produced this image showing the rotation of the Earth

Wi-Fi is built in, and we had no trouble browsing and transferring photos and videos using a Nexus 4 Android phone and third-generation iPad. There’s also an option to geo-tag photos with the help of a smartphone’s GPS radio, but there’s no remote control function.

PERFORMANCE – SHOT TIME

The S110’s weakest area was its lethargic performance in normal use, taking 2.4 seconds between shots. The S120 is fitted with Canon’s latest DIGIC 6 processor, and performance is much improved. We measured 1.4 seconds between shots in Auto mode, although it only managed 1.6 seconds in Program mode. Strangely, it rattled off a RAW shot every second – we’ve never seen a camera take RAW shots faster than it takes JPEGs before.

It’s particularly odd because the continuous mode demonstrates that this camera isn’t short of power for processing JPEGs. The fastest mode set off at precisely 10fps, and with a fast SDHC card, it showed no sign of slowing after 100 frames. That’s the fastest continuous performance we’ve ever seen from a compact camera. It can also shoot at around 5fps with continuous autofocus – a useful trick that’s also available on the LX7. However, very few of these shots were actually in focus. Even when the subject was relatively static, autofocus would sometimes wander back and forth, with only one in five shots in focus. RAW continuous capture was much more sedate at 1.9fps, or 1.2fps with continuous autofocus. At this speed, the autofocus success rate was much higher.

VIDEO

Videos are recorded at 1080p at a choice of 30 or 60fps frame rates. We’ll happily stick to the slower frame rate, as it’s more widely compatible and means that clips run for up to 23 minutes. At 60fps, they stop at around 16 minutes. Video quality was top notch, with crystal clear details that made the LX7’s footage look slightly woolly, and sophisticated noise reduction keeping things neat and tidy in low light. Meanwhile, the five-axis stabilisation made handheld shots appear to float with a magisterial grace. Touchscreen autofocus and subject tracking are available for videos, and both the focus and zoom motors were virtually silent.

IMAGE QUALITY

Photo quality will be a more pressing concern for most people. It’s reassuring that Canon has resisted the temptation to raise the resolution. Even with the generously proportioned sensor and wide-aperture lens, excessive noise is more of a threat than insufficient detail, and 12 megapixels strikes a sensible balance.

The S120 produced some impressive photos, with crisp details and barely any hint of noise in brightly lit conditions. Processing RAW files in Lightroom 5 gave no tangible benefit to detail levels, but that’s a reflection of the high quality of the JPEGs. However, on a few occasions we noticed a hazy glow around clipped highlights that wasn’t so flattering. The automatic white balance didn’t perform as reliably as we’d hope, either, with a dominant colour in the scene making colours in the photo come out slightly skewed and flat.

Crisp, smooth details and natural colours – this is what we expect from a premium compact.

The subtle colours in this shot could easily have come from an SLR rather than a compact camera.

This photo isn’t so impressive, though. The green foliage looks muted and the swan as a radioactive glow.

Zooming in pushes the ISO speed up, resulting in a softening of details.

Shooting outdoors in overcast weather, the camera sensibly raised the ISO speed to avoid camera shake. Noise reduction kept colours looking reasonably clean but fine details were sacrificed as a result. Indoor photos suffered a similar fate. High-ISO photos looked fine at typical viewing sizes but they didn’t lend themselves to heavy cropping as much as the LX7’s photos with its brighter lens.

This ISO 800 shot doesn’t look particularly noisy but there’s a lack of fine detail, and once again, a slight haziness around highlights.

Shooting indoors at the wide-angle end of the zoom, the f/1.8 aperture lets in lots of light to maintain high image quality.

This is the same shot taken from further away at the long end of the zoom – the ISO speed has quadrupled and fine details have vanished. Still, kudos to Canon that its JPEG noise reduction is a match for Lightroom’s handling of the RAW file.

We prefer the LX7 with its superior image quality, faster shot-to-shot times and longer battery life. The S120 has its own strengths, though, including a slimmer design, bigger zoom, touchscreen and Wi-Fi. Then there’s the Panasonic LF1, which is just as slim, has an even bigger 7.1x zoom, a similar aperture range to the S120, Wi-Fi with remote shooting and an electronic viewfinder, although it lacks a touchscreen. All three are excellent cameras that we’d be happy to own, but the S120 takes the bronze medal in this contest.