Canon PowerShot S60: Follow-up to the S50

General Image Quality

For these pictures, the camera was reset to its factory default setting. Then, it was set to its highest quality JPG setting. The pictures were then taken in Auto mode unless otherwise stated. Click on a thumbnail to view the full-size image. The crops below the thumbnails are 100%.

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This picture shows that the S60 is capable of a great level of detail. Also, the colors are well-saturated producing a pleasant overall appearance. There were no problems to speak of here.	In this picture of a strongly backlit building, the S60 we detected some chromatic aberrations. To be fair, however, this type of shot (with strong backlighting) is prone to have some degree of chromatic aberrations.	Although the subject in this shot is well-exposed and sharp, we should point out the blurriness in the upper right corner. We found this to be more common among wide-angle shots. There are also some chromatic aberrations visible in a few spots.

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This picture was taken at a certain wedding last weekend. As we can see, there is no red-eye in this low-light image and the AF-assist lamp provided a sharp focus. Also, skin tone looks good with no apparent color cast.	Although the S60's flash did a good job illuminating the subject with a fair amount of detail, we were disappointed to see chromatic aberrations visible in several areas.	In this macro image, the bee and pollen are captured with impressive detail. We should also point out some chromatic aberrations along the edge of the petal at the top of the image.

Overall, we were satisfied with the image quality of the S60. Although chromatic aberrations are visible in some of our sample shots, we feel that most users will not find this to be a huge issue in terms of overall quality. The S60 is capable of producing well-exposed pictures without any effort in Auto mode and we were impressed with the detail in Macro mode.

Video

Below are two samples from the S60's Movie mode.

640x480, 10 fps Right click to download.

320x240, 15 fps Right click to download.

We weren't very impressed with the quality of the S60's video capability. In 640x480 mode, the images are very choppy at 10 fps. Although the second clip is taken at 15 fps, it would be hard to say the video looks smooth. We were also disappointed that the clips were limited to 30 seconds at 640x480 and 3 minutes at 320x240 and 160x120. In general, we would really like to see Canon make some major improvements to their Movie mode.