My S90 arrived yesterday from B&H. After charging it up, I went out and took some pictures. I was particularly interested in how noisy it is at higher ISOs and also the f/2 lens. You can see the results here. The Space Needle sequence is shot at different ISOs. Take a look at the filename or the EXIF for details, but basically I shot ISO 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200. Starting at ISO 200, there's a denoised version next to each picture (using the Nik Dfine). All of these were shot with auto focus and auto white balance. The coffee cup pictures were shot in macro mode at f/2. The sequence is ISO 80, 400 and 800 - all handheld. I attempted a custom white balance for the ISO 80 and 400 shots. The ISO 800 shot is auto white balanced. There's a denoised ISO 400 and 800 version too. A quick comment about the lens aperture range. The following lists how wide you can go for the available zoom lengths:
- 28mm: f/2.0
- 35mm: f/2.5
- 50mm: f/3.2
- 85mm: f/4.5
- 105mm: f/4.9
So if f/2 is a key requirement for you, know that to use it on the S90 you'll be limited to shooting wide angle at 28mm.
All the pictures were shot in RAW mode and then converted. I used Lightroom because I didn't have the Canon software loaded (and there doesn't seem to be a full version on the web). The current version of Lightroom apparently has some kind of known distortion issue, but that should have little bearing on the noise aspects. This distortion is particularly noticeable on the cup shots.
The addition of the lens ring is a nice, though it makes the camera operation feel unlike any Canon compact I've ever used, so I'm going to need to spend some time learning how to best use it.
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