As we all know, Canon's S90 S100 models have pretty much set the bar in The Advanced Point And Shoot market for the last 4 1/2 yrs... Until recently ( With the advent of The Sony RX100). Canon sales more cameras than almost all other brands combined, this does not indicate, however; that they are the best in all categories, but that they are either the best over all, or at least in the top 5 for most classes of cameras.
I have owned many Canon Cameras and printers over the years, and I have been very happy with most of them, but I also place a lot of stock in fellow Amazon customer's reviews. For many months, I noticed that every other review, or updated one, for The Powershot S100 indicated a nasty lens error. That said, this time around researching advanced P&S's, I decided to see what other Brands such as: Nikon, Fuji, Panny and Sony were offering... What I found was this, Other brands have really took notice of The Canon S and SX line's success and or offering very stiff competition!
Sony has, IMHO, set the New Standard with the almost perfect Advanced P&S, The RX100. My coworker owns one, and it stomps all others in this now crowded class! Only problem is that it cost over $650.00, but the image quality, and low light rendering are truely amazing! Needless to say, Sony discounts its products about as often as Apple discounts its products... NEVER! The Panny Lumix LX5 and LX7, Nikon P300 and P310 and Fuji X10, are all now offering very good to excellent image quality in this class. You saw correct! I did include The Nikon Coolpix P310! Nikon has really stepped their game up with The Coolpix Line, in fact; this was the only model that came close to The Canon S100 and S110's Bang-For-Your-Buck. Price, it is $200 less than Canon S110, $450 less than The Sony RX100, while offering excellent I.Q., pocketabillity, low light performance and manual controls... Sans Raw mode. Came so close to getting The Nikon P310, before you judge me, just take a gander at the online sample shots of this camera!
In the end, I came back to The Canon S110. Chose The newer S110 over The S100 in the hopes of avoiding The Lens Error (Fingers Crossed). So happy with this camera! The S110 looks identical to The S100, but let me tell you, Canon has made some huge improvements with The 110. Canon has improved upon the sensor and auto focus speed of this model, added usable ISO, WiFi and touchscreen functionallity. Low light performance is a lot like that of The S95 and S100 combined. Allow me to explain. Sometimes The S100's colors would be a little off in low light, casting an orangish hue... as if shot in sepia. The Powershot S95 rendered sharp, detailed and very accurate colors in lowlight, but the lens was a bit slow under these conditions. I don't know what Canon did, but there is almost zero lag in AF, despite others claim that this is a slower lens or sensor than its predecessors. Color, contrast and sharpness are spot on! I predict that the next S model will have a larger sensor to be competitive with The Sony RX100's lowlight performance, but until then, I have to say that the S110 is very close in low light image quallity and will surpass the Sony, although at the cost of a higher price point and perhaps a larger form factor because of the larger sensor.
Battery life has never been an issue with me, because I rarely took over 100 pictures in a day and never used GPS tagging or logging. I also rarely shoot video clips longer than 10 min. in a day,also buy cheap aftermarket Batt.s as back-up. Canon's addition of WiFi to The S-Line is really cool and useful; I use it way more than I thought I would! It is implemented very well with this camera, much smoother and faster than using Eye-Fi's top of the line card... That's an $80 dollar value right there! Lol Also, I already own a Canon SX-230HS and many extra batteries. The S110 uses the same battery ( NBL-5) as The SX-230. Yes! Winning! WiFi connection with your smartphone or iPhone is almost instantaneous, once the App. is opened on the device, or printer turned on. GPS functions are combined with these WiFi transmissions between your phone and camera, and they are thus also instantanious.
The WiFi operates very efficently, and a cool, bright, blue LED lights up on the top of the camera when it is connected. It flashes when busy. The Camera asks if you would like to geotag or log your location while connected to your phone or computer. It is a 2 second affair, so GPS no longer drains your battery. Built-in GPS and Eye-Fi cards do not work nearly as seemless as this! I had issues when first setting this connection up, because I thought I could bypass the step where you connect the Camera to a computer via USB cable and run software CD... You have to do this step! I think you may have to also Register your S110 for it to properly set up initial WiFi.
Touchscreen: Very Responsive, and can be adjusted.... Nuff said on that.
CONS: The things I don't like about The Canon Powershot S110 are pretty much all ergonomically based. These things are true of the entire S series, and perhaps the indicative of the entire Class of these type cameras. They are not easily handled or operated... even on Auto! EXAMPLE: A friend, family memb., or pedestrian says, "Hey, YOUR NAME HERE, I noticed you are taking everyone else's picture, would you like me to take yours with the group?" You have to explain that this really tiny, hard to press button turns the camera ON. When it turns on be careful, because the flash is going to come up over here. If you want to zoom in it's the tiny switch here next to the shutter button. Now, you only want to press the shutter button halfway to compose the shot... it'll beep when ready, then you push it all the way down to take the shot. See? Some ergonomic issues have gotten better with this version of The "S".... others the same or worse. 1. Front grip is gone. 2. As on all The S Models, power button is way too small and recessed. 3.Mode wheel blocks index finger from shutter button. 4.Flash makes camera hard to handle with left hand. 5. if touchscreen shutter is on, camera will take picture if finger contacts screen before you are ready. I guess some things have to be sacrificed for a small form factor, but I feel comfortable giving anyone my Canon Elph 300HS and it is the smallest P&S ever produced!
There is no loud knocking noise when zooming in video, but there is a slight wherling sound when I zoom in video. Hard to notice and can only be heard when passage is very quiet during playback, but it's there... none the less. Wish Canon would get that worked out. All and all EXCELLENT IMAGE QUALITY and cool added features, deffinately recommended! The White is very cool looking and although glossy does not show prints as much as I had anticipated. The Black/Mat is sleek and modern looking like a stealth plane.... was a hard decision to make! UPDATE: Have now taken close to 400 shots. Still going strong! There are a few points that I should add to my review. Some I forgot, and some are new discoveries.
1. Wifi connection.: I own a Huawi Glory/Mercury Android smartphone which is still running Gingerbread. The S110 connects flawlessly with this phone, but what I found out is, you must be near an open WiFi network or hot spot for it to work. The Camera's Wifi will not work over 3G or tethered to your phones mobile hotspot. Also, The S110's WiFi will not connect wirelessly to Windows7 Basic,Starter or any OS older, such as XP or Vista. It won't work on Macs older than OSX 10 or whatever Apple's answer for Windows 7 was. I was told by a Canon Rep. that it works well with full versions of Windows 7, and extremely well with Windows 8. We will see. Waiting for Black Fri. to snag a Windows8 computer.
2. Touchscreen Shutter: Amazingly, the touchscreen functionallity of The S110
has really impressed my friends and family. It really comes in handy when I
give The S-110 to someone, in order to get in the picture myself or for
some one to swipe through the pictures, using their finger to preview.
3. Price Point: I purchased The Powershot S110 for $390 used, and it came
new, in box with all contents still sealed in plastic. Nice! The main reason
I purchased the S110 over the S100 was it was only $38 dollars more at that
time, and I felt that was a small Diff. to pay to hopefully avoid The Lens
Error. I really am happy with this little camera. The functions and menues
are very easy and quick to access with the lens ring and touchscreen. Before
I was using Auto way too much... Now, I am truely learning, in a fun easy way
about F-stops, apperature, ISO, white balance, shutter speed, etc. Things
that I already kinda knew about with my Eos T3 and even my S95, but seemed
to much trouble or laborious, are now fun and easily implemented to play
around with. I am having, "A Ha moments," where I think aaah, that's why
that turned
out good or bad with my DSLR... The S-110 is the perfect learning tool to
whip out of your pocket, purse, or Camera Case and start learning and capt-
uring. I also played around with The Canon G15 and G1X. Salesman at camera
store told me that G15 used pretty much the same sensor,lens and processor
as The Canon S100 and S110. The Powershot G1X really impressed me with its
image quality though; seemingly better than even the more expensive, Sony RX
100! I understood why when he told me it had an SLR sized sensor. The G1X is
a beast, though! Holding it, it felt the size and weight of my T3 without the
lens! Way too large, but may be Canon's answer to The New Sony, Panny, Fuji
and Olympias in this class. He offered it to me at the same price as the G15
$550 plus Uncle Sam's cut (Tax), but it still was more than I could afford.
So here I am. A happy S110 owner. Lol
Been using my new white S110 for a few days now and my initial impressions are:
Build Quality Very good, nicely finished has the look and feel of a quality product
Features: Touch screen is responsive, AF is speedy even in low light, knurled front ring makes adjustments easy and fast, typically good, easy-to-follow menu system and initial setup. LCD is bright and visible even in Florida sunlight. Auto white balance seems pretty good. The Auto function works surprisingly well choosing a scene mode and applying image parameters. With the Auto mode, I have not witnessed any unexpected blown-out highlights and shadow detail is pretty good. Image stabilization appears to work very well, perhaps 3 stops worth. Conversely, wireless setup is a monster nightmare that involves Canon Gateway, registering, modifying your network settings and then just maybe it will work. After almost 30 minutes of tinkering, I was able to transfer 16 photos to my laptop but it took almost 15 minutes to accomplish the transfer. Much easier to just use a card reader and then upload photos to social media sites, email, etc. Canon has not made this feature user-friendly. I will not be using the wireless capability.
Image Quality: Very good up to 800 ISO little noise, good detail, and color. 1600 is still good. 3200 perhaps for small prints only.
Overall: Good camera; however, Canon's engineers made the wireless curse-worthy. Build quality, image quality, handling, ergonomics are all above average. My only caveat involves the price...kind of pricey for a couple of features over the S100. If you can find an S100 with a serial number above 42xxx (infamous lens error problem), you'll have basically the same camera as the S110 sans the touch screen and the wireless features at a much less expensive cost. I plan to keep my S110 since it is so very pocket-able, fast, and puts out very decent images especially at lower ISO levels. Canon states that the S110 has a newly designed lens. I am just hoping they have rectified the frequent lens error problem of the S100. Time will tell.
Buy Canon PowerShot S110 12MP Digital Camera with 3-Inch LCD (Black) Now
The Canon Powershot S110 brings some key performance improvements as well as the touchscreen which makes this 4th generation S series camera probably the best yet.
With regards to image quality, I have to admit that I liked the S100's image quality better. The color, contrast, and sharpening levels seemed much better in that camera than they do in the S110. Not that the images are terrible. But JPEGS look a little crunchy at lower ISOs for my taste, and color and contrast by default give photos a flatter appearance than its predecessor (and the G15). It also overexposes and blows out highlights. Detail capture is quite respectable though. If you are willing to process the RAW files from this camera, you can get some really nice results. I just think the JPEGS aren't all that great compared to its predecessor. The camera does have good ISO performance though. I was quite impressed at ISO800 how good of a job the camera did at balancing noise reduction and detail retention.
Canon uses the same 5x F2-F5.9 lens as they did in the S100. It's unfortunate they haven't taken the opportunity to put a faster lens in this model because most of the competitors have much faster lenses on their cameras. That said, the lens is fairly sharp. It also zooms in and out fairly quickly.
Sadly, the camera has lost the little indent on the front which helped give you a more secure grip. However, the surfaced is textured in such a way where you can still get a decent grip, and it's not slippery like the Sony RX100. The LCD screen is 460k dots, and while it's pretty decent, I think Canon should have taken the opportunity to upgrade the resolution with this model. The big update this year with the LCD is that it is now a touch screen. To be honest, it's not very practical for adjusting camera settings but does work extremely well for touch focus and touch shutter. It's a much better setup than having to go into the menu to adjust the focus area. The touchscreen overall, though, is very responsive and works well.
The control ring up front remains on this model and is still excellent to use. With decisive clicks everytime you adjust something. You can of course customize the control ring up front to adjust a number of settings.
As far as performance goes, shot to shot times are about the same as the S100 but autofocus performance has improved on this model. I wouldn't say the camera has blazing fast autofocus but it should be plenty quick enough in most shooting situations.
As for the video, it is surprisingly good for such a small camera but is most suitable for short clips.
I think the Canon S110, which is selling for $400 right now, still offers a lot of camera for the money. It continues with the very decent image quality of its predecessors and adds a very useful touch screen for touch focus along with improved AF performance. In addition to still being the most pocketable enthusiast compact out there. There are some aspects of the camera which should have been improved with this model but were not, and that is unfortunate, but overall it is a great like its predecessors were.
Read Best Reviews of Canon PowerShot S110 12MP Digital Camera with 3-Inch LCD (Black) Here
The S110 is a truly amazing subcompact camera and is probably the best pocket able camera for under $350 you can buy at today's prices. The Sony RX100 is probably the best subcompact camera but it costs twice the S110 price and is missing some key new features that separate it from the subcompact camera competition. I rated the S110 5 stars because it is a great subcompact camera at a great price. The price does fluctuate so watch for a good deal if you decide to buy.
I upgraded my Canon S95 which is still working perfectly two years later after taking over 5000 images. The images I've taken with that camera rival the other more expensive digital cameras with larger sensors and lenses that I own. It's one camera I always have with me. When you compare the S95 with the S110, they almost look identical. There are of course a few changes in the button layout and the surface appearance. Why change a successful camera? The S110 is a tad heavier by a fraction of an ounce over the S95. The interface is the typical Canon interface and it's easy to find your way around. The separate video button is now standard on virtually all cameras today so that's not so special but it is nice to have.
The S110 has many new and improved features that make this camera an even a better camera than earlier versions. The processor, sensor and zoom have changed but the basic camera shape remains the same. The things I like a lot that are either new or improved from the Canon S95. The biggest changes came in the S100 released a year ago. That model while improving on the S95 had some lens issues on a number of the cameras especially when it was first released. You can see some of the negative reviews list the problems. If you didn't have a bad lens, you probably loved that camera. Today it sells for more than the S110 which is surprising.
The S110 has much faster autofocusing. It allows faster image capture. New image processor. Here are some other things which add greatly to the user experience.
1. Touch Screen interface. Helps in focusing on subject and faster setting things up.
2. WiFi that replaces the GPS unit is not present on S95. There are many possibilities with this...
3. F2 starts wider at 24mm instead of 28mm equiv.
4. Wider zoom range 5X versus 3.8X. So its wider and with more telephoto.
5. Better low light capability and a much expanded ISO range. Very high ISO images are possible.
6. Expanded digital zoom up to 20X is surprisingly good but not typical super zoom quality.
7. Many more manual and custom settings possible.
8. Expanded compensation
9. Slightly improved ergonomics with thumb rest and slightly rougher texture on the surface, allowing a better grasp. You still need the wrist strap for safety reasons.
10. Full high definition video, 1080P at 24FPS with separate video button.
11. Slightly stronger flash.
12. Excellent and expanded image stabilization. (Which is pretty good)
13. Excellent image quality with the new CMOS sensor. Much better low light images.
14. Many advanced features. (it does take time to try everything)
15. Separate charger for the battery, allows charging second battery while using the other battery
16. Has a new level meter to help keep your camera positioned correctly. It does help at times.
17. Contains some self-help on the LCD that can be removed.
The things that are not so great and that are not improvements.
1. Smaller battery, the same as the earlier SD series. It means fewer pictures per charge. Two of my earlier Canon subcompacts used the same battery so I now have spares.
2. Change from CCD to CMOS sensor brings some change in image quality and noise.
3. Flash pop up location pushes finger and can startle an unsuspecting holder.
4. HD video is MP4 and allows less video footage but is easier to edit.
5. Still only a small starter manual. Manual is PDF and can be downloaded.
6. No remote trigger. You can set delayed shutter snap at 2 or 10 seconds.
7. Button placement is similar but different. The power button is harder to push. The shutter button is larger.
8. The same popup flash that will hit your finger if you don't change your left hand position.
9. Build quality is very good but is not at the level of the Sony RX100. It is a combination of metal and plastic. Does feel very solid.
10. As you zoom out to about 100mm, the F stop is over F5 and not so great for low light. You may need to raise the ISO to get an image.
If you do decide to buy this camera or the Sony RX100, Panasonic LX7, you will not want to retire your dSLR, or Super zoom or whatever because those cameras offer features not possible with a very small camera without viewfinder. The Canon S110 is truly pocket-able and at the current price is half the price of the Sony RX100 making this camera seem like a best buy in the subcompact field. A subcompact camera is a must have camera because, you can carry it everywhere. The current crop of smartphones can take a decent images for the internet but don't come close to the image quality or convenience of the Canon S110 and other subcompact cameras.
Want Canon PowerShot S110 12MP Digital Camera with 3-Inch LCD (Black) Discount?
Before any camera pro jumps on me for choosing the S110 over the RX100, let me first explain why:
I am not a photographer or even an amateur one. I want quality photos and video when I am out, but easy.
It has to be easy for my wife to use
It has to fit easily into a pair of jeans pockets
I do not print photos or do any touch-ups. What I get from the camera, is what I have.
I currently own a Canon S95 and love it just do not like that its only 720p video and cannot zoom during video
The touchscreen is very useful and makes it easy to make sure I have the right focus. Zooming on photos was easy and second nature. Going back to S95, I quickly found myself trying to touch its screen.
That said, I felt the RX100 did take better photos. Its a superb camera, but consider these:
Its bulky compared to the S110, and though it fits in my jeans pockets, it is not comfortable
The UI is difficult sometimes to navigate. My wife could not figure it out. I was able to figure it out and did enjoy it, but the wife did not like it at all. Neither could a few friends at least not easily.
The video was better on the RX100 (60p vs Canon's 24p) but the Canon's video was very good also.
The battery life was better on the RX100 (my biggest gripe with the S110 is that I need to have a spare battery)
In a blind photo comparison on the laptop, 3 out of 4 family members picked the Canon's photos. It is probably because of the image processing that the Canon does. While I know that a true photographer would edit the RAW photos in Photoshop that is not me. What the camera gives me is what I share.
The price double the price of the S110, just didn't seem justified for a point-and-shoot person. Perhaps for the photographers out there looking for a companion to their DSLR, but not for me
I give it 4 stars because of the poor battery life and that 24p video is not enough
