The oldest high-zoom digital camera in our roundup is hardly a dinosaur. Like its 2008 competitors, Canon's $400 PowerShot S5 IS-released in May 2007 resembles a smaller digital SLR in look and feel. Its optical zoom maxes Out at 12X.
The S5 IS comes with excellent optical image stabilization. This feature worked brilliantly except at maximum zoom in, at which point image blurring occurred. The face-detection technology is clever, too, but sometimes it's just as easy to set the focus yourself. The camera has a basic video editing feature stich assist for piecing together panoramic images, and color adjustment and white balancing for low-light shots.
The chunky handgrip offers a stable hold with easy access to every control with either your index finger or your thumb. A convenient, dedicated button for recording movies sits next to the camera's viewfinder, and an ingenious power/mode lever allows easy toggling between modes. The only control 1 missed was a ring for manual focusing; you must use a directional pad, which can be difficult and time consuming.
The flip-out LCD screen on the SS IS is a tremendous plus. It's large, bright, sharp, and fully articulable. That's especially fortunate because the camera's electronic viewfinder displays a picture worthy 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 whenever I decided to zoom way in.
Picture quality varied. Otherwise good images occasionally suffered from a noticeable degree of noise at anything above midrange ISO. In addition I detected an odd blurriness around the periphery of many of my images.Despite including a handy function menu for the most common options, the S5 IS has some "hey let's just throw it in" features that clog menus (a wolf-howl sound effect for the self-timer-really?). For every great feature that it offers (image stabilization, stereo microphones), another is missing (manual focus ring, RAW file support). But the good far outweighs the bad, and the S5 IS is a solid camera for aspiring amateurs.
