Info about Cameras
Canon PowerShot S80 – review
The powerful, concrete, 8-megapixel PowerShot S80 is the modernized version of thePowerShot S70, last year's Editor's Choice winner. The camera is expensive ($549.95 list), but most aspects have improved, and a few have been left out. For itself, the S80 becomes our Editor's Choice for full-featured, compact digital cameras.
The weight of S80 weighs just 7.9 ounces, but has loads of features. The 3.6X optical, 5.8- to 20mm zoom lens (35mm equal: 28- to 100mm) has a highest f/stop range of f/2.8 to f/5.3 across the zoom range. It gives perfect 28mm wide-angle view (that the S70 also had)—it's grand for taking in big slices of an outdoor or interior landscape.
The flash was either too powerful or not too powerful and missed its mark, but as such gave excellent results in most situations. Luckily, you can alter the settings to decrease or increase illumination. The S80 offers extra flash features, like the second curtain strobe, which fires right ahead of the time when shutter closes, in its place of just after it opens. This can create some truly imaginative shots, where sections of blurring or long streaks of light give a sense of movement and motion to your stills.
The S80 has improved over the S70 in many ways. It improves the sensor to 8.0 megapixels from 7.1, at the same time also improves video aspects significantly. Instead of 10 shoots per second you can shoot at 30 frames per second and save until you load the memory card, giving you much longer, smoother clips. The S80 has a beautiful 2.5-inch screen while the S70 has only a 1.8-inch LCD. The superior display creates the photos viewed on the camera look just striking. Canon also kept back the glass viewfinder—an element many producers appear to be doing away with.
Regrettably, the RAW ability has been done away with so as to let alone the overlap of features with the devotee Canon PowerShot G6. But interestingly, many S80 specs are the identical or improved specs than those of the G6. The S80 LCD is better, the sensor has a superior megapixel count, and the lens is wider-angle—28mm to the G6's 35. The S80jus slow in the recycle test.
In our daylight test shots, the image were fine, color saturation was excellent and all in all the exposure was excellent and dynamic range outstanding.
The flash test gave a solid exposure with good dynamic range and the flash coverage was very fine—sufficiently strong to give even lighting, but not so strong that it overcome the scene and blew out whites. In general, the image was a touch underexposed (about a half f/stop), and that threw off color saturation and fidelity a little.
Our flash shots exposed a little more sound than the daylight shot. We think the higher ISO setting is the reason, but it can’t be verified as the S80 doesn't include the exact ISO setting in its EXIF info listing.
Resolution had an average of 1,800 lines that is good for an 8MP point-and-shoot camera and grand for big prints and at the time of cropping images. There was no obvious pincushion distortion at the telephoto end of the zoom range and just a bit of usual barrel distortion at the wide-angle end.
The video quality of S80 also impressed us being smooth and clear, with decent color saturation and fidelity. The audio was also satisfactory for a compact camera. The camera allows you zoom for video, but it's only digital zoom. As a result, when replayed the part of the video that employed digital zoom, we observed the quality went down very fast as the zoom increased.
The S80 booted in just 2.6 seconds which is very fast —nearly twice as fast as the S70—but its 3.4-second recycle time was almost a second slower than the S70's. There was no shutter lag though.
The Canon PowerShot S80 is a sturdy compact camera that takes outstanding photos. It may be a bit pricey, but as resourceful compact digital cameras go, you won’t get something better easily.