Friday May 05, 2006

Canon S3 IS

And here's what I got with my Progress Package money :

That's the Canon S3 IS, and that was last Thursday (27 Apr 2006). Been eyeing this one since months back, and when a ClubSnap forumer said it was available, I went down on the very same day. $760 for the camera, and another $120 for a 2GB 50x SD memory card for a "total damage" of $880 - out of which $700 was sponsored by gov.sg.

Considering that the money came into the bank account the next day (28 Apr), you could say that the net out-of-pocket cost was just $180. Not too shabby for a new 6-megapixel digital camera with 12X optical zoom (equivalent to an awesome 432mm), camcorder-quality video recording at 640x480x30fps with stereo audio, and Canon's latest DIGIC II image processor.

I was looking for a "really fast camera" with competent video recording, and "lots of zoom" - having been a little frustrated at the lack of it with the A510 at the Asian Aerospace. Well, this is it. It's fast. It turns on in a second or maybe less, and you just press one button to start video recording. I can take one flash photo after another seemingly without stopping. USB 2.0 transfers at 3-4 MB/sec are 10x faster than the A510's USB 1.x at only 300-400 KB/sec. The zoom is often more than what I can use, I don't think I'll need more than that for most situations - one could always get the 600mm teleconverter lens add-on but I think that's a little overkill unless for another air-show or something.

Video recording is one of the "star features", and it's pretty good. No more grainy, slow, flickering 320x240x15fps slide-shows now, though it *is* still available if you want to save on the memory. The 640x480x30fps mode does really chew up the RAM though, at roughly 2 MB per second (!!!). According to the (ahem) "G-spot" utility, the video file is encoded at an insane 14,644 kbps bit-rate using the Motion JPEG codec (with much more typical bit-rates for XVID videos being only around 700-1200 kbps), and the audio is also similarly insanely-encoded : *uncompressed* 44.1-KHz PCM audio. You could re-compress, I suppose, using maybe 1500 kbps XVID for the video and 128-kbps MP3 for the audio, but it's going to be troublesome, and obviously it's going to be lossy.

With the really crazy bit-rates and encoding being used, the LCD display tells me I have only about 15+ minutes of recording time on the 2 GB card (or 1100+ photos at full resolution, or 700+ with super-fine mode). It's okay, I prefer taking more photos, and some short video clips anyway. Really no time to transfer and edit video from lengthy Mini-DV tapes.

User interface is fine - being a long-time Powershot user, everything is nice and familiar. One thing about Canon's UI design for their cameras, you can just about pick up any model in their entire range from the lowest end to the highest end, and it works more or less the same. The interface is easy, and it makes sense.

And here's a in-depth review over at dcresource.com if you want more details.

(2006-05-05 21:01:53 SGT) [Musings] Permalink

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