The Canon S90's Mode dial is nice and firm, just the way it should be, reminding me of the dials on the Canon G11. The front ring is indeed charming, and works reasonably well with most settings, but it can be assigned to too many tasks. You also won't be shooting in complete darkness, but a dark office with the blinds closed on a rainy day is pretty darn dark. With the Canon G11, I used some fall leaves as an example, shot just moments after I shot the same scene with the image you'll see in the Gallery, but I found it even more troublesome when shooting some Christmas display lights.

Selecting iContrast in strong sunlight we found gave added definition and depth to a shot that could otherwise be left looking a little wishy-washy and hazy if the camera was entrusted entirely to its own devices. But the Canon S90's lens and sensor combination do some amazing stuff in low light, so much so that it's a Dave's Pick for that reason alone. Perhaps more predictably, point-and-shoot user friendliness on the S90 comes in the form of the fully automatic face detection, motion detection and Smart Auto scene detection technologies regularly found on Canon's snapshot compacts. I can shoot for a week, using my S90 as my only camera, and fill only half of a 4GB card with thousands of great images. With a camera like a Nikon D700, Canon 5DII, or Leica M9, the files are geared towards more experienced digital shooters and they assume you will process your images to suit your tastes and vision.It's likely that Canon has chosen to let its target enthusiast photographers do their sharpening in post, a strategy they've pursued since at least back to the EOS 20D. The remaining shooting modes put more and more settings under your control: Program AE, Shutter priority, Aperture priority, Manual, and Custom.

A compact at ISO 80 is about as noisy as a DSLR at ISO 800, and the S90 gives me much cleaner, clearer files at ISO 80 than any other compact. By default, this rear Control dial adjusts exposure compensation in Program mode, and it's so loose it does so all the time, whether you want it to or not. Go on to take the shot and there's little if any discernable shutter delay, while full resolution JPEGS are written to inserted (optional) SD or SDHC card (there's no internal memory provided to fall back on) in the standard two to three seconds, with Raw files - selectable in program or one of the other four creative shooting modes - taking a mere fraction of a second longer. Finally, another compact camera to come my way to challenge my wife’s trusty D-Lux 4, the KING of 2009 COMPACTS IMO!Images look just a little better defined than the LX3's images, but you have up to five noise reduction options with the LX3, while the Canon S90 has no option. I'm told that you can add a comment that will appear in the EXIF data, which you set under Preferences as "Owner's Name" in the included CameraWindow software. I managed to enhance the luminance noise, but the chroma noise was so light that I got essentially the same result as I get from the LX3: crisp images with a nice grain pattern to them. Ultimately I should have bracketed this shot just to be sure, as the histogram wouldn't have told me much. Only downsides I've found are that you shouldn't expect shallow depth of field shots (as with any compact really) and the lack of a grip means it isn't al ways the easiest camera to hold if you have big clumsy hands like me.