Top-notch image quality and a high-end feature set make the compact 5-megapixel PowerShot S50 irresistible.

Canon took the PowerShot S45 and added a megapixel -- and out popped the S50. This 5-megapixel pocket camera is a pleasure to shoot with, and it delivers excellent image quality. It also comes with direct-print compatibility with a range of Canon printers. If you want to use lens converters or an external flash, you'll have to take a step up to the PowerShot G5; otherwise, this digital camera deserves a spot on your short list.

Compact enough to carry easily in a jacket pocket or a purse, the S50 weighs a moderate 260g without the battery and media installed. Its solidly constructed metal body houses a 3X zoom lens that's protected by a sliding cover when retracted. The physical controls are well placed and easy to operate -- except for the oversensitive four-way controller, whose mushy operation can lead to unintentional selections.

We took the S50 out shooting with a couple of other high-quality compact models, and as the day progressed, it became our favourite for spontaneous shots. You'll have no problem making lightning-fast changes to important options; the intelligent control layout combines dedicated buttons with a very clear, convenient function menu to put almost all the adjustments you need at your fingertips. Notable exceptions are the red-eye-reduction and slow-sync flash modes, which you must turn on or off in the main menu system -- a location generally reserved for infrequently changed settings.

Flipping the Play switch enables image review whether the lens is extended or retracted. If it's extended, you can go right back to shooting with a half press of the shutter release. The handy Jump button expedites playback by allowing you to skip through 10 pictures at a time.

The S50's feature set is both broad and useful. You get a choice of five exposure modes: manual, programmed auto, shutter priority, aperture priority and fully automatic. There are five scene modes, as well. You'll also find a panorama and a custom-settings option on the mode dial. Shutter speed can be anything from 15 seconds to 1/1,500 of a second, and the f2.8-to-f4.9 lens covers a focal range of 35mm to 105mm in 35mm-film-camera terms.

You can autobracket either exposure or focus; pick from three metering systems, four ISO selections, nine white-balance settings and four colour modes; and manually adjust contrast, sharpness and saturation. You get both exposure and flash-exposure compensation. When you focus manually, the LCD shows an enlarged view of the frame's centre. Unfortunately, there's no dynamic histogram to help you adjust exposure in shooting mode, but a static one will let you check your available-light skills in review mode.

In movie mode, you can record 3-minute, 320 by 240-pixel video clips with sound. There's also a voice-memo feature for annotating stills. In addition, the S50 has two continuous-shooting modes and an interval-shooting setting.

One of the S50's notable features also makes it one of the best compact choices for avid photographers: it supports RAW files. Many consumer cameras let you save uncompressed TIFF files, which lets you eke out better image quality than JPEG provides, but RAW is a far better solution. Shooting RAW files is quicker, they take up less storage space, and they increase your creative flexibility. For example, you can alter many of a RAW file's parameters -- white balance and contrast, for example -- after you've downloaded it to your computer. Plus, if you take a great JPEG shot, you can save it after capture in RAW by pressing a button during the quick review -- a very cool feature.

Unfortunately, Canon's included RAW conversion and editing software is slow and inconvenient. Right now, Adobe's RAW plug-in doesn't support files from the S50, but we'd be surprised if that situation wasn't remedied sometime later this year. When you opt to shoot JPEG files with the S50, you have four resolutions and three compression settings to choose from.

Since it's designed to be a pocket camera, the S50 doesn't take lens converters or external flash connections, but that doesn't mean you can't accessorise. Canon makes an underwater housing for the device, and it supports direct printing to the company's compatible portable and inkjet printers.

The S50 performed well in our tests, even on shots of mobile and unpredictable subjects like children. However, we weren't as impressed with its start-up; it takes about 5 seconds, depending on how quick you are with the sliding lens cover. Fortunately, you can save some time by setting the camera to standby. In this mode, the LCD turns off after a short period to conserve battery life, but the S50 remains ready to shoot instead of automatically shutting down. You can also slide the lens cover over one click to retract the lens without fully powering down.

Shot-to-shot time for highest-quality JPEG files runs slightly more than 1 second, or about 2 seconds if you use the flash, thanks to a preflash burst. Shooting RAW files lengthens the wait to approximately 6 seconds. That may sound a little slow, but if you've ever waited 20 seconds for another camera to save a TIFF image, you'll feel like you're flying. One continuous-shooting mode captures seven highest-quality JPEG photos at about 1.2 frames per second (fps); the other grabs eight at 1.9fps. The faster option achieves its speed by shutting off the LCD preview. With either, the flash will slow you down by only a tenth of a second or so per shot, since it preflashes before only the first one.

If you autofocus, shutter lag is about half a second in bright light and as much as 2.5 seconds in darkness, but if you prefocus, it's unnoticeable. The Autofocus Illuminator shoots a beam of blue light at your subject to help the camera focus quickly and decisively both in the dark and in low light, for which it's very effective. The S50 lets you choose between centre autofocus and selectable nine-point AF, and there's a three-frame focus-autobracketing feature, too.

The S50's relatively large 1.8in. LCD shows a sharp, smooth picture that's adequately viewable in bright light. In low light, the camera lets the picture go dark instead of automatically boosting the gain, so its LCD doesn't maintain brightness as well as some competing models, which deliver the compromise of a noisy but usable LCD viewfinder. If it's too dark even at the maximum brightness level, you can always turn to the optical viewfinder. It's a little small and shows only 83 percent of the frame, but is reasonably bright.

We're very pleased with the S50's images. Exposures generally came out just right, and our photos showed excellent detail and dynamic range. Canon's firmware doesn't oversharpen the pictures, so they have a very smooth -- if slightly soft -- look. Noise levels are low, and even our ISO 400 shots were less noisy than what we've seen from many 5-megapixel competitors. We recommend using the ISO 50 or 100 setting when shooting in bright light to obtain beautifully smooth, noise-free shots.

Of course, there's still some room for complaint. The red-eye reduction rarely worked at all. And Canon still insists on using an automatic white-balance system that makes pictures taken under incandescent or tungsten light look extremely warm. If you don't want every indoor photo to look as though it were taken next to a bonfire, use the indoor preset or manual white balance. We also saw purple fringing in some of our high-contrast shots, especially near the edges of the frame, but it cropped up infrequently and wasn't especially severe.

Canon PowerShot S50
Company: Canon Australia
Price: AU$1,399
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 021 167

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