Canon's PowerShot S1IS has been a revolutionary breakthrough in camera designs. A stylish, lightweight silver camera, comfortable to handle and easy to use; perfect for the beginner or amateur (professionals may also consider using it sometimes, depending on the type of shot wanted).
With an astonishing 10× optical zoom, there can be no doubt in saying that it is one of the most powerful cameras on the market, in comparison with other similar cameras. Optical zoom is the real, true zoom that manages to produce good quality images by repositioning the lenses. The maximum digital zoom of 3.2 can be combined with the optical zoom to produce a maximum zoom of 32×. However, the more digitally zoomed, the courser the image is, resulting in a lower quality image. This is because digital zoom is a way of magnifying an image using computerized techniques.
The Canon PowerShot S1IS holds a 3.2 mega pixel charged-coupled device (CCD - image sensor) and has a maximum image size of 2048×1536. This is approximately standard of similar cameras. Adding further to its sleek design, are the various functions/modes built into the camera. This includes the manual focus (MF) button, from which you can manually focus on objects from 5 metres, all the way down to just 10 centimetres - extremely good for flower photography and macro/close-ups. Also, there is an autofocus facility, which I find works fantasticly, but when you zoom in on an object or a subject quickly, it takes a few seconds to automatically focus.It also includes a landscape mode; portrait mode; night scene mode; movie mode; fast shutter for shooting racing cars etc; slow shutter for producing artistic images such as water falling from a waterfall in a gorge.
The movie mode is selected by adjusting the dial to the image of the movie camera; image quality can be changed by going to the 'FUNC' button. The minimum resolution from a movie is 320×240, producing good quality movies and combined with, say 15fps, with a 32MB CompactFlash card, it can make a movie for a maximum of 1 minute and 31 seconds. The size of the movie can also be adjusted to a higher resolution, such as 640×480 pixels, but the length of the movie decreases as the quality increases. You can also have a third option of 640×480 fine pixel, but I often find that this freezes every few seconds and for this reason, I recommend that you get a large memory device for the high resolution.
When I first got this camera, I rushed out to the east of Kent, snapping away, with the shutter release button. When I got home, I downloaded the images onto the computer, thinking that they would be of bad quality and out of focus - yes, okay, several of them were extremely out-of-focus, but that was only about 34 out of 110 images I photographed that day. Most of them were just quick snapshots; one of my friends liked several of the images so much, that he asked for a few colour prints. These images were of the weather, especially with images of an unexpected and unusual thunderstom at sunset in August 2005. I took the images from the inside of a car, to prevent myself from getting wet and also to prevent the camera's lens from being hit by splatters of rainwater.
There is so much to talk about with this fabulous camera that I just couldn't keep baffling on forever. You can even place the camera on a stand and give your images and old-fashioned look by selecting the black and white facility, as well as many other special effects.
To sum up, this camera is inevitably one of the best cameras that I have ever had, with an image stabilizer to help prevent camera shake or blur; lightweight; relatively small; versatile; and best of all, it produces fantastic quality images, even with a staggering 10× optical zoom. This camera can offer you some of the best images ever.
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May 20th, 2006
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