Is that a camera or are you going to shoot me?
About six months ago, I blabbered a bit about wanting to upgrade my point-and-shoot camera. I like to carry a camera with me whenever possible, just in case I see something strange. For a long time, my 2 megapix digital ELPH served that purpose quite well, but I wanted something that would give me more control over the exposure while still being small enough to put in my pocket. Six months ago, I had pretty much decided to get the Canon S50, but it was $600 at the time—a bit too steep for this “starving student”—so I waited and was recently able to get one, still brand new, off of eBay for $350. I haven’t had much time to play with the camera yet, but I’m a little disappointed with it. It’s a noisy camera—in two ways. First, the motor that extends the zoom lens makes turning the camera on/off or zooming sound like you’re elevating the barrel on an Abrams tank. Kind of trivial, I suppose. The other noise is what will determine whether I keep the camera or resell it on eBay. I find the images to contain a lot of noise, especially above ISO 100. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the extremely low-noise images from my 10D, but now, image noise bothers me a great deal, and it may cause me to get rid of the S50. I’ll have to wait until I can take some more pics with it to decide. Here’s one of my ugly mug I took while playing around with it—I had adequate lighting to use ISO 100, so it doesn’t look too bad (the picture that is; my face, admittedly, is a different story… poor, poor Natalie).
