4 The Canon PowerShot S90 is a high-end point & shoot camera that takes great photos and provides great manual controls for serious shooters. The video it captures is not particularly impressive, though.
Canon's own SD970 IS is cheaper than the S90 (about $320 against the $430 of the S90) and shoots higher resolution images (12.1 megapixels against 10 megapixels). But more megapixels do not a better camera make; the two cameras were very evenly matched in our resolution tests. And we also found that the S90 had less noise in images than the SD970, which is another consequence of higher resolutions. But we did find that the video that the SD970 captured was better than the S90; the SD970 had better color and more detail in the video it captures. That's partly because it captures video at a higher resolution in 720p format, with a resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels.
