Canon PowerShot S45 review

The Canon PowerShot S45 is an evolution of the excellent PowerShot S40 - itself one of the few digital cameras that had a range of sensible features, including many that might tempt the semi-professional photographer to choose it as a compact back-up.

The new S45 uses the familiar satin aluminium and brushed stainless steel body with a slightly blue hue, emphasised by a smattering of blue legends. Although compact in dimension, the camera is more suited to a coat rather than a shirt pocket.

Build quality is great, though the ergonomics haven't changed from the earlier S40, and it retains the same building block feel. However, the substantial weight of 350g, including the bulky rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery and Compact Flash card, makes a reassuring impression.

The dials, levers and buttons are intuitively placed and well machined, although the play button to the rear is easily snagged, and annoyingly displays the last image, even though the camera is switched off. Unless the power-down feature is activated, this will flatten the battery. The sliding lens cover works well, and Canon has left both the 3x optical zoom lens and 4-megapixel imaging chip alone. This is odd, because 5-megapixel CCD's have been employed by Olympus and Konica at this price, and by not upgrading, Canon runs the risk of appearing slow to embrace the latest technology. Still, the quality of output is what matters at this level.

Keep focused

For the serious user, the camera offers full control over exposure, focusing and metering, with additional control over white-balance, sharpness, contrast and colour saturation available separately from a shortcut key. Aperture Priority and Manual are the exposure modes most likely to be adopted, although Shutter Priority and Program options are also available, as, inevitably, are a number of subject-based program modes for snap shots as well.

A welcome addition is the custom feature which allows an often-used combination of modes and settings to be saved even when the camera is switched off - incredibly, even the focal length of the zoom can be recalled. Using the manual exposure mode, both apertures and shutter speeds can be set individually in 1/3 EV steps, and the exposure deviation is displayed on the top left of the 1.8-in monitor.

A wide shutter speed range from 1/1500 sec to 15 seconds is offered, although the aperture is a little restricting. At 35mm, its quite fast at f/2.8, although its minimum is just f/8.0 - only barely enough to control depth of field.

At 105mm the maximum aperture drops disappointingly to just f/4.9, with the same f/8.0 minimum. Unless used in bright lighting conditions or in combination with the flash, the slow maximum aperture will result in some camera shake from low shutter speeds.

Manual focusing has been well thought out, however, with an enlarged target area and a distance scale to aid accurate focusing. But it's the inclusion of the new scrollable auto focus frame, borrowed from the new PowerShot G3, for off-centre subjects that is likely to be of more use.

Image quality is first rate, with great skin tones and neutral colours under daylight, and the accuracy of metering is among the best we have seen. Even under artificial light, which stretches image quality to its limit with low light levels, image quality was very good; still, using the white balance preset is a must. Images saved to the supplied 32Mb Compact Flash card are in the JPEG format, with three compression levels and an option to save before or, in some modes, after the event as a 3.8Mb RAW file. This must be processed in the accompanying File Viewer software, using Mac OS 8.6 to OS 9.2, although, regrettably, it's incompatible with OS X (except in Classic mode).