The Canon PowerShot S90 is rather expensive for a point & shoot camera at $430. But it has the performance to justify it, with the camera achieving excellent scores across most of our tests. Most point & shoot cameras do well in one test but poorly on others, but the S90 was good across pretty much all of them, with accurate color, low noise at most ISO settings and sharp, clear images with plenty of detail.
The control ring on the front of the camera is also a big plus, adding another way to take control of the picture taking process. This is one of only a handful of point & shoot cameras that allows you to easily control both shutter and aperture settings in the manual mode. With most point & shoot cameras, you have to set shutter speed and then aperture, but the S90 puts shutter speed on the front control ring and aperture on the back control dial, so you can set both quickly.
The things we didn't like about this camera were few, but the main one was the poor video mode. In an age of point & shoots that record high definition video, the blurry, grainy 640 by 480 pixel video that the S90 shoots feels positively primitive. This would be a big problem for the user who wants a do it all device; they would be better off with a camera that shoots better video such as the Panasonic ZS3. And the S90 will be overkill for for those who just want to take snapshots, but it is an excellent pick for the photographer who wants a compact but controllable camera that shoots great photos.
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