Canon PowerShot S120 review

IMAGE QUALITY – CLICK SAMPLES TO ENLARGE

Photo quality will be a more pressing concern for most people. It’s reassuring that Canon has resisted the temptation to raise the resolution. Even with the generously proportioned sensor and wide-aperture lens, excessive noise is more of a threat than insufficient detail, and 12 megapixels strikes a sensible balance.

The S120 produced some impressive photos, with crisp details and barely any hint of noise in brightly lit conditions. Processing RAW files in Lightroom 5 gave no tangible benefit to detail levels, but that’s a reflection of the high quality of the JPEGs. However, on a few occasions we noticed a hazy glow around clipped highlights that wasn’t so flattering. The automatic white balance didn’t perform as reliably as we’d hope, either, with a dominant colour in the scene making colours in the photo come out slightly skewed and flat.

Crisp, smooth details and natural colours – this is what we expect from a premium compact.

The subtle colours in this shot could easily have come from an SLR rather than a compact camera.

This photo isn’t so impressive, though. The green foliage looks muted and the swan as a radioactive glow.

Zooming in pushes the ISO speed up, resulting in a softening of details.

Shooting outdoors in overcast weather, the camera sensibly raised the ISO speed to avoid camera shake. Noise reduction kept colours looking reasonably clean but fine details were sacrificed as a result. Indoor photos suffered a similar fate. High-ISO photos looked fine at typical viewing sizes but they didn’t lend themselves to heavy cropping as much as the LX7’s photos with its brighter lens.

This ISO 800 shot doesn’t look particularly noisy but there’s a lack of fine detail, and once again, a slight haziness around highlights.

Shooting indoors at the wide-angle end of the zoom, the f/1.8 aperture lets in lots of light to maintain high image quality.

This is the same shot taken from further away at the long end of the zoom – the ISO speed has quadrupled and fine details have vanished. Still, kudos to Canon that its JPEG noise reduction is a match for Lightroom’s handling of the RAW file.

We prefer the LX7 with its superior image quality, faster shot-to-shot times and longer battery life. The S120 has its own strengths, though, including a slimmer design, bigger zoom, touchscreen and Wi-Fi. Then there’s the Panasonic LF1, which is just as slim, has an even bigger 7.1x zoom, a similar aperture range to the S120, Wi-Fi with remote shooting and an electronic viewfinder, although it lacks a touchscreen. All three are excellent cameras that we’d be happy to own, but the S120 takes the bronze medal in this contest.