It's the oldest megazoom camera in this roundup, but it's hardly a dinosaur. Canon's $400 PowerShot S5 IS, released In May 2007,represented the company's latest foray into the advanced, high-zoom digital camera market. Like its 2008 competitors, it has the look and feel of a smaller digital SLR. Its optical zoom maxes out at 12X.
The S5 IS comes loaded with a host of bells and whistles, including excellent optical image stabilization;the featureworked brilliantly for stills and movies in my testing unless I was zoomed in to the max. The face-detection technology is also clever, although sometimes it seemed just as easy to set the focus yourself. The cameraalso has a basic video editing feature, stitch assist for piecing together panoramic or mosaic images, and color adjustment and white balancing options for unusual and low-level lighting situations.
The chunky handgrip offers a stable hold with easy access to every control with either your index finger or your thumb.A convenient, dedicated movie record button sits next to the camera's viewfinder, and a clever power/mode lever allows easy toggling between modes. In fact, the only control I really missed was a ring for manual focusing;instead of a ring, you must usea directional pad for your thumb, whichI often found more difficult and time consuming than it ought to have been.
The flip-out LCD screen on the S5 IS is a huge plus: It's large, bright, sharp, and fully articulable. And that's fortunate,since the camera's electronic viewfinder has a picture reminiscent of a gas station security monitor; it's pretty much useless for anything other than gross composition.
The 12X zoom is quick and quiet, and the autofocus was snappy except at maximum zoom; sometimes it had to search for the proper subject when I zoomed way in. Picture quality was a mixed bag: Otherwise good images sometimes suffered from a noticeable degree of noise at anything above midrange ISO.I also noticed an odd blurriness around the periphery of many images,a hint that Canon may have stretched these optics to their limit.
Despite a handy function menu for the most commonly used options, the S5 IS has an overabundance of hey-let's-just-throw-it-in features that can clog menus (a wolf-howl sound effect for the self-timer? Really?). This feels indicative of the uneasy balance Canon has struck between the consumer and professional markets: For every great featurethe S5has (image stabilization, stereo microphones),another ismissing (so-so optics, no RAW file support). Overall, though, the good outweighs the bad, and the S5 is a solid camera for aspiring amateurs.
--Dave Carroll