Canon PowerShot S230 Review
By Brooke Bertling
February 12th, 2004
Summary
The S230 is a great value in a small form factor. It features a host of manual controls for those who prefer to do some tweaking, but the automatic mode is perfect for those looking for nothing more than a nice point and shoot.
Images are crisp, clean and quite impressive for the size and price. We had very few complaints with the S230, notably the time between pictures can be a little long when using the flash and the shutter lag that we experienced when the camera was in anything but automatic mode.
In some of our test shots, we noticed a slight blue-purple discoloration around the edges of some objects, but it was very slight. However, most of our images and movies came out excellent in both manual and automatic modes.
Full Review
Introduction
The PowerShot S230 is about the same size as the previous models in the Digital Elph series. It is not exactly tiny, but it will fit easily into most pockets so it can be taken just about anywhere.
Canon updated the image processing chip and added several subtle upgrades from their previous models. This is Canon's first 3.2 megapixel CCD digital ELPH, but they spent time on more than the lens and image processor.
One of the more noticeable upgrades is the use of a standard driver which allows the camera to be connected to most computers without having to load specific drivers. This allows most current operating systems to find the camera and show it as a removable drive, which can be more convenient than having to use the provided software.
There are also quite a few more manual settings that were missing on some of the older models. The case feels very solid and looks very nice. The 1.5" color TFT LCD display is a little smaller than we would like to see, but the quality of the display surely makes up for the small size. The buttons and controls are laid out in a very natural way. For those of you who have used other ELPHs, you'll notice a few small changes here and there, but for the most part the controls are quite similar.
Accessories provided with the S230 include: a wrist strap, an A/V cable, a USB 1.1 cable, the a 16MB compact flash card, a lithium-ion battery, a battery charger and two CDs with imaging software and drivers. The 16MB compact flash card is enough to get you started, but plan on updating that pretty quickly as you will only get 8 of the highest quality pictures on it.
The Canon PowerShot S230 3.2 megapixel digital camera.
Point-and-shoot
Charging the battery will take you about 2 hours if it's completely dead, which is plenty of time to browse through the manual. With both the battery and memory card in the camera, it still weighs only 7.6 ounces. Once you press the power button, the camera is booted and ready to go in about three seconds.
The default automatic point and shoot mode is easy enough for anyone to use. Turn it on, point it at what you need and it takes care of white balance, focus, ISO speed, and deciding if you need a flash or not. The zoom is easy to use, although we often found ourselves wanting a little more than the 2x optical zoom. The LCD is bright enough to see in most settings and the default preview, the time an image is displayed after you take a shot, is just long enough to decide if you need to retake the picture or not. This preview time can be adjusted by the user if necessary.
Out of the box, this camera is a masterpiece of point-and-shoot simplicity. Once you feel the need to change some settings, the menu system is easy to navigate and understand. Changing settings and modes is fairly simple, although without reading the manual, you may have problems finding all of the options.
A simple breeze through of the manual will get you going and once you know what buttons to press to get to the features, you start to see why they did what they did. Getting to settings that are quite common is very quick and you do not need to navigate through a bunch of menus to find what you need. Canon provides some quick keys to get where you want to go.
Options such as changing from manual to automatic modes, turning on and off the flash, exposure settings, and white balance are all outside of the menu system. As a result, when you are in a hurry, it is very easy to change these settings.
In the normal shooting mode, it takes between two and three seconds between shots, but put it into continuous shooting mode and that number is down to around one second. Continuous mode usually worked well, but in order to get a full sequence of high resolution shots, it sometimes had to stop and write to the compact flash for up to 15 seconds in the middle of the sequence, greatly diminishing the usefulness of that mode. One solution to this is switching to movie mode, which records in AVI format, however, the maximum image size is only 640 x 480 pixels.
There is also a timer mode, the default is a 10 second timer but there is a two second setting in the menu system. If you want to be inconspicuous while taking your pictures, or not distract people with a flash or focus assist beam, these options can be turned off. Turning these features off does cause a little more shutter lag while the camera tries to figure out what to focus on, but that can be reduced by learning to help it along by pressing the shutter button half-way. We found that by doing this, it seems to make the camera lock onto an object in the field of view.
The small size and the ability to tweak some of the extra features make this a great camera for candid shots. Taking a look at your images in the playback mode is as simple to use as it can be. You can look at one image at a time or nine at a time in a thumbnail mode. The zoom controls will zoom in on the center of the screen and the navigation keys allow you to move the picture around to zoom on a specific area. This is very nice for making sure the pictures you took are exactly as you want them without having to offload them to a computer first.
Battery life was excellent and Canon's rating for its lithium-ion battery was right-on. We were able to take about 150 images with the LCD screen on.
Conclusion
The S230 is a great value in a small form factor. It features a host of manual controls for those who prefer to do some tweaking, but the automatic mode is perfect for those looking for nothing more than a nice point and shoot.
Images are crisp, clean and quite impressive for the size and price. We had very few complaints with the S230, notably the time between pictures can be a little long when using the flash and the shutter lag that we experienced when the camera was in anything but automatic mode.
In some of our test shots, we noticed a slight blue-purple discoloration around the edges of some objects, but it was very slight. However, most of our images and movies came out excellent in both manual and automatic modes.
Performance
Click on each image for the full-size version:
This was taken in Automatic Mode, Highest Quality
ISO 50, exposure -1, no zoom, Cloudy White Balance
ISO 50 exposure 0, white balance set to Tungsten
ISO 100, white balance Day Light, exposure -.33
Specs
TYPE OF CAMERA
Compact Digital Still Camera with Built-in Flash, 2x Optical Zoom.
IMAGE CAPTURE DEVICE
Type 1/2.7 inch Charge-Coupled Device (CCD)
Total Pixels Approx. 3.3 million
Effective Pixels 3.2 million
LENS
Focal Length 5.4 — 10.8mm (35mm film equivalent: 35 — 70mm)
Digital Zoom 3.2x Digital Zoom (Maximum 6.4x digital zoom is available when combined with optical zoom.)
Autofocus TTL AiAF (9 focusing points), TTL AF (user- select focusing point)
VIEWFINDERS
Optical Viewfinder Real-image optical zoom viewfinder, approx. 82% coverage.
LCD Monitor 1.5 inch low temperature polycrystalline silicon TFT color LCD
APERTURE AND SHUTTER
Aperture Range f/2.8 — f/4.0
Shutter Speed 15 — 1/1500 sec. (Long speeds from 1 sec. to 15 sec. must be user-set in Long Shutter Speed mode)
EXPOSURE CONTROL
Sensitivity Auto/ISO 50/ 100/ 200/ 400 equivalent
Light Metering Method Evaluative Metering or Spot Metering
Exposure Control Method Program AE
Exposure Compensation +/- 2.0 EV in 1/3 step increments
WHITE BALANCE
White Balance Control TTL Auto White Balance; Pre-Set White Balance (Available Settings: Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H); or Custom White Balance. (taken from white object or 18% gray card).
FLASH
Built-in Flash Operation Modes: Auto/ On/ Off, Auto Red-Eye Reduction Auto/On, Slow-Sync.
SHOOTING SPECIFICATIONS
Shooting Modes Auto, Program, Manual, Stitch Assist, Movie..
Photo Effects Vivid Color, Neutral Color, Low Sharpening, Sepia, Black & White
Continuous Shooting Approx. 2.5 images/sec.
IMAGE STORAGE
Storage Media CompactFlash (CF) Card Type I
File Format Design rule for Camera File system (DCF*1)
Print Order Format Digital Print Order Format (DPOF) Version 1.1; Exif Print Compliant (Exif 2.2)
Image Recording Format Still Image: JPEG Movie: AVI
JPEG Compression Mode SuperFine, Fine or Normal
Number of Recording Pixels Small: 640 x 480, Medium 2: 1,024 x 768, Medium 1: 1,600x1,200, Large: 2,048 x 1,536, Movie: 640 x 480, 320 x 240 or 160 x 120.