Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3

[schindlerpiste]

6mp; 12x zoom. $300.

To me, it seems like this is a lot of bang for the buck. Anyone own this camera? Are there better cameras out there for about 3 bills?

[summit]

Smaller sensor and no optical viewfinder. Otherwise a feature rich high performance fast super zoomer with IS.

Ask the Gosey. He has one.

[Duffman]

I was looking at this too and still am debating between this or the A710. Anyone use either of these here. I love the idea of the long, fairly fast zoom lens, but the 710 seems to be much easier to carry around, especially in a ski jacket pocket, and would probably see more use for me both skiing and around town. What do you all think?

[focus]

I bought the S3 a couple weeks ago. I haven't had tons of opportunity to use it yet, but so far am pretty satisfied. It's reasonably quick, and the big zoom is really nice to have. We got it primarily to take pictures of the kids -- our old A75 just wasn't getting it done anymore. I do anticipate using it for taking some skiing shots and dabbling a little bit with some photography.

Close runner-up to the S3 was the Panasonic FZ8. I think getting a tiny, cheaper P&S may be in the cards for Christmas, just for when the bulk of the S3 makes it impractical. The S3 stashes just fine into a diaper bag, backpack, or my man-purse (laptop bag) so is easy for me to have along 98% of the time. If you don't routinely carry a diaper bag, backpack, or purse it may be a pita... though it really isn't that bad. It's small enough to fit into a large jacket pocket.

IS works fairly well. The movie button is actually pretty handy. AF doesn't seem to have any trouble keeping up. I'm not sure how much our camcorder is going to get used anymore... w/ a 4GB SD card it has just as much capacity. Max size per movie file is 1GB... 9 minutes or so at the highest quality setting? May not work great for your kids recital, but the majority of video that we shoot is just a couple minutes here and there.

Not to turn this into a "look at my cute kid" thread...

These are all just snapshots. They're straight from the camera, except for being scaled down, and they could all benefit from a little bit of tweaking. Just to give you a vague idea of the output from an extremely casual user. If you want any full-size images I'd be happy to send you some.



Auto Mode -- high ISO makes it a little grainy, but it's easy enough to look at.


Dark room.




Ugh...peas. (the wall is painted "light peanut." If I'd realized how crappy a picture background it would be I would've painted it a different color.)



Autofocus has been giving me some fits. I'm still figuring it out...too often my background is tack sharp and my subject is soft. The MF feature is a little clumsy to use.


More playing with gimickry.


edit: I've posted this elsewhere, but this is also something to look at if you're considering the S3 or one of the A-series - http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK/FAQ