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Friday, March 04, 2005

Canon's Powershot S500 Scores a Perfect 10
Product Review
By David Johnston

This is Canon's top-end compact point-and-shoot camera. It is very comparable to the SD-20, but comes with a 3x optical zoom and uses compact flash instead of secure digital. The image quality is amazing and the package is very, very small. There is no need for a lense cap, and the lense completely retracts when not in use. If you want an example of a picture that I, an untrained novice photographer, took with this camera after just reading the manual see here:

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# Permalink Posted at 7:17 AM 4 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

Not bad from a P&S, nice contrast anyway, but the sharpness leaves a lot to be desired. Also there's a lot of chroma bleeding (presumably from the JPEG compression); look, for instance, at the yellow tree leaves in front of the shaded window on the left; notice the yellow blurring all around.

Another test you could do is a high contrast edge, like a roofline, to see how its bayer mask interpolator does; you shouldn't see purple fringing.

# posted by Jim Frost 9:25 AM

I think some of the color bleeding in that shot could be due to the settings I was using. I had it set on vivid which, as far as I can tell, just boosts the color. That was part of the point of the picture. I wanted the colors to come out. It's by no means supposed to be a professional camera...or even close. But for a person like me who doesn't know what 50% of the things you talked about are, it does quite well.

# posted by David 9:40 AM

Shoot, that picture was so purdy, I had to put it on my desktop!

# posted by Ray Ross 6:49 PM

Thank you for the compliment! I'm glad you liked it :)

# posted by David 10:38 PM

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