Canon S1 IS Digital Camera (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Sun]

Luckily for me, my S1 has the black mark dot on the inside of the CF card panel, so I guess I don't need the firmware yet (until another revision surfaces).

 

[Travis Hedger]

Awesome samples Patrick. This camera is on my list of possibles, along with the Panny FZ 20 coming out next month. 12x Optical stabilized zoom. Don't know about the movie mode though.

Could you take a quick movie of about 10 or 20 seconds? I would be interested to see the quality of your camera at the 640x480@30fps.

 

[Joey_V]

Just bought the camera a week ago.... one word: awesome! very handy and very nifty! although it should be more than 3.2 mp and should have a dedicated macro.. i feel that because i dont shoot anything more than 3 mp, this camera is fine, not to mention i was still able to auto-"macro" just by trying to take a picture of a close object (within 3 inches).

although i feel that the camera should have better lowlight focusing... this can be easily overcome by using the manual focusing... ingenious!

overall... 4.5/5 stars.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I haven't even tried the movie mode, maybe I'll give that a shot soon.

 

[Travis Hedger]

Thanks. I wanna see how good the quality is. Maybe just take a quick vid of the street with some moving cars or something.

 

[Holadem]

So... how does this stack up against the S410?

--
H

 

[Patrick Sun]

Well, if you care about Optical Zoom, then the S1's 10X optical zoom with IS beats the S410's 3X optical zoom, but if it's megapixels you care about, the S410 offers 4MP, while the S1 offers 3.2MP. If you want a compact camera, again, the S410 is a better choice (but at the trade-off in Optical Zoom).

 

[Holadem]

I see. I will pro'ly go with the S1... it looks like a MAN's camera

--
H

 

[Travis Hedger]

One thing I keep forgetting to ask. How is the shutterlag? Meaning, how quick is it to take pictures once the button is pressed? This is one of my biggest beefs with some digital cameras. Some take as long as over a second to actually snap the picture. Where as the Digital Rebel is click click click, and you have 3 pictures instantly.

 

[Patrick Sun]

If it's pre-focused, the shutterlag isn't bad at all. The AF can take about a second to lock in (it's better in good light, and not so good in low light situations).

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Well, if you want MY camera, then you'll need to pony up a whole lot more both for the body and the lens. :wink:

Personally, I can't see anyone calling the S1 a man's camera. Looks more like a lady's version of a man's camera down to the silver color thing. Get the Pro 1 if that's what you're after. Too bad they didn't put IS on the Pro 1 though.

RE: shutter lag, it's mostly AF lag. Some of the other brands like Sony and Minolta seem to offer faster AF to reduce this lag, but so far, Canon has not done much in this area. OTOH, one does wonder if some of the faster AF performances from competitors are getting there w/ less reliable AF results. I don't have the experience to know for myself, but I do occasionally hear murmurs about that.

Anyway, at this point, you just won't get the AF performance of a DSLR w/ these digicams. It's at least one selling point for the DSLR's as far as these camera makers are concerned. You'll note that all the ones that seem to try to offer faster AF do not have any DSLR's on the market (yet).

Oh, something else to try w/ any digicam. Use as many manual settings as feasible so the camera has less to figure out, eg. white balance, etc. This seems to help speed things up for the after-focus lag.

_Man_

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I've shot some video with mine and used various software packages to make DVd movies out of them. The image quality is pretty good for what it is (a digital camera not a video camera)

 

[Joey_V]

from my experience between my old coolpix3200, the kodak 6490, and the canon s1... the canon s1 is very quick in taking pictures. compared to the 6490 especially, the s1 has very little delay between shots. just point and click, then click again to skip the post-shot view, then point and click again.. over and over and over again.

very nice camera!

i researched for almost a month before finally deciding on the s1.

my main interests:
kodak 6490
minolta z1
minolta z2
canon s1

needless to say S1 won out in the end.

 

[Joey_V]

oh and video mode is very nice. of course, dont expect dvd quality.. but man, if u have sufficient light, and u record at 640x480 @ 30fps (fine).... man... sweetness!

 

[Patrick Sun]

I tried the video capturing feature, but my PC wouldn't play the AVI clip it produced. Will I need to load up the
Canon software to watch the AVI clip? I haven't loaded any of the Canon software yet. I was able to watch the clip on the camera, though. Maybe I need some new codecs.

 

[Travis Hedger]

Sounds reasonable.

On a very old digicam I had from them, an A200 I think, you couldnt just plug in the USB cable to xfer photos, you had to have a special driver just for that.

 

[Joey_V]

regarding the not being able to play the avi file.

u probably need new codecs to be built right into the windows media player. try downloading media player 9 straight from microsoft's website. also, look for a divx codec (version 5 i think) on google... should be a quick download.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I have no problems playing the AVI's in WMP9 and I just made a DVD of a couple of vid's I took this afternoon and they turned out pretty good other then a little wind noise.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I have no idea how it happened, but I took over 250 photos yesterday, and they all mysteriously got deleted from the CF card. Is this possible if I put the camera in my bag and some buttons get accidentally pushed? I am seething right now.

Is there any way to recovered deleted files from a CF card? The recycle bin definitely had no answers for me.

What's even more puzzling is that if I do a "properties" on the card's drive content, I do see that 48.5MB of the 256MB CF card is used. So, I guess the photos are still there, but the FAT is hosed.

 

[Steve Felix]

There are recovery programs for that purpose. I didn't find a free one in my cursory glance but the first of these two links has a free trial:

BadCopy Pro
Image Resuce 2.0