Canon PowerShot S30 Review

Overall Rating

Great manual features
Fast operation (time to save pictures to CF card and so on),
Small enough to go in my pocket,
Great picture quality,
Good battery life.

4-way controller is fiddly.

I purchased one of these Canon Powershot S30 digital cameras a little over a month ago-in time to take it on holiday with me to Florida. I've so far taken about 800 pictures and I'm delighted with the results. Until now I've been using a Canon EOS-300 35mm SLR which is big and bulky. I've long wanted to move into digital photography but the Canon digital SLRs are just too expensive for me. I chose the Powershot S30 because it has almost all of the manual features of my SLR. It has all the same pic modes (portrait, landscape, sports, nightscene and so on) plus a couple more that my SLR doesn't. The only things I've lost in replacing my SLR are the flash hotshoe and swappable lenses/filters.

Image quality is everything I hoped for. I take everything in highest res and best quality JPG and I get 69 pictures on a 128M CF card - more than enough for a day's shooting and I carry the 16M card that came with the camera around as well just in case. I also purchased a second rechargable battery so I'm always carrying a fully charged spare. I shoot everything using the screen on the back of the camera and I've only had one day of shooting where I had to switch to my backup battery. Batteries charge from empty to full in about 80 mins.

The software that came with the camera has so far been excellent. I already own PhotoShop 6 so I don't use the picture editor that came with the camera but I do still use the ZoomBrowser image library program. I find it easy to use. It's particularly useful for organising my pictures into folders and running slide shows.

The only negative point I can find is that the 4-way controller with the "push-in-the-middle-for-set" doohicky is fiddly. You'll get used to it but not before you've sworn at it a few times. This is a very minor problem, though, since it's rarely used (I really only press "set" when I'm deleting a single picture). Other than that the button layout is very natural and if you've used a canon camera before you should find it works just like you'd expect.

One quick point for those of you wondering whether to buy this or the S40. For me the price difference was not worth it simply to get another million pixels. The S30 is 3 megapixels and that's a heck of a lot - if you take pictures at max size they're already far far bigger than you can fit on your monitor (unless you have a monster monitor of doom with a video card to match). Personally I still take pictures in highest res so that I can crop them down and still have great quality. The higher res of the S40 still wouldn't help much, though, because once you've cropped a lot you'll start finding that the lens aberrations or your own poor focus become too much of an issue. So basically - unless you have money to burn I'd recommend the S30. If you have money to burn then start looking at the Canon Powershot G2 instead.

The bottom line - I love this camera. So will you.