Canon PowerShot S100

I am by no means a serious photographer, but just wanted to get a digital camera for the convenience of being able to take a lot of random pictures without having to pay for the cost of developing. I wanted something portable and started looking at the Canon S20 but when I saw the S20 and the S100 next to each other in the store, I knew the S100 was the camera for me. Though the dimensions of the two camera only differ by a little, when you see it is a huge difference

The camera comes with a 8meg memory card which can take 15 pictures at 1024x768 on the high quality but not the highest quality. For the highest quality I think you can only take 4 pictures but I have never needed to use that. Picture quality is great, especially when there is plenty of light. When it is a little darker, the pictures tend to come out dark, but nothing that photoshop can not fix. There is definitely a little bit of lag between when you press the button and when the picture actually takes, but from my experience most point and shot cameras are like that.

The display on the camera is smaller than most digital camera, but that's what happens when you have a tiny digital camera. At night, you can hardly see anything in the display though the actual picture turns out much better. I personally don't like to use the display at all. I usually use the standard view finder but the view finder is definitely more zoomed in than the real pictures so be aware of that.

The one downside of the camera is the rechargeable battery. It does not have an indicator of how much power is left in the battery (like 50% versus 20%). Once the low battery indicator comes on, you hardly have any shots left. This sucks if you are on a all day trip or what not. A second battery helps this situation and I bought one for less than $50. A second memory card is also a necessity, and I bought a 64 meg one for around $100. Another super convenient accessory for this camera is the Sandisk Compact Flash reader. It plugs into your USB port and mounts a removeable drive to your computer. It acts just like any other drive, double click on it and all your pictures are there in a folder as jpeg for you to preview or just to drag and drop into a folder on your hard drive

overall, i love my canon s100 camera. People are always surprised with the size that it's a digital camera. I carry it around with me everyday in my bag or pocket, and can take it out anytime to take random pictures that come up. Picture quality is great for me, though it is a little dark when there is not enough light, but for me, a good camera is a convenient one that I will use a lot, and this is definitely the best digital camera for me

Note: I bought this camera for it's size. Indoors in a dim room you MUST be close to the subject. Also, if you want to turn the flash on (as opposed to "auto") you have to put the camera into "manual" mode and then turn it on. It's not hard to do but the three previous cameras I owned had a seperate flash button.