Canon PowerShot S120 review

We’re normally not too fussed about scene presets, but we like the new Star presets. One of them used exposure times of around 15 seconds at ISO 800 to capture impressively detailed photos of the night sky. Another combined dozens of exposures over the space of an hour, capturing stars as concentric circles as the Earth rotated.

An hour of multiple exposures produced this image showing the rotation of the Earth

Wi-Fi is built in, and we had no trouble browsing and transferring photos and videos using a Nexus 4 Android phone and third-generation iPad. There’s also an option to geo-tag photos with the help of a smartphone’s GPS radio, but there’s no remote control function.

PERFORMANCE – SHOT TIME

The S110’s weakest area was its lethargic performance in normal use, taking 2.4 seconds between shots. The S120 is fitted with Canon’s latest DIGIC 6 processor, and performance is much improved. We measured 1.4 seconds between shots in Auto mode, although it only managed 1.6 seconds in Program mode. Strangely, it rattled off a RAW shot every second – we’ve never seen a camera take RAW shots faster than it takes JPEGs before.

It’s particularly odd because the continuous mode demonstrates that this camera isn’t short of power for processing JPEGs. The fastest mode set off at precisely 10fps, and with a fast SDHC card, it showed no sign of slowing after 100 frames. That’s the fastest continuous performance we’ve ever seen from a compact camera. It can also shoot at around 5fps with continuous autofocus – a useful trick that’s also available on the LX7. However, very few of these shots were actually in focus. Even when the subject was relatively static, autofocus would sometimes wander back and forth, with only one in five shots in focus. RAW continuous capture was much more sedate at 1.9fps, or 1.2fps with continuous autofocus. At this speed, the autofocus success rate was much higher.

VIDEO

Videos are recorded at 1080p at a choice of 30 or 60fps frame rates. We’ll happily stick to the slower frame rate, as it’s more widely compatible and means that clips run for up to 23 minutes. At 60fps, they stop at around 16 minutes. Video quality was top notch, with crystal clear details that made the LX7’s footage look slightly woolly, and sophisticated noise reduction keeping things neat and tidy in low light. Meanwhile, the five-axis stabilisation made handheld shots appear to float with a magisterial grace. Touchscreen autofocus and subject tracking are available for videos, and both the focus and zoom motors were virtually silent.