The other day, I went and took some snapshots in the field across the street. As I said, it was hot and so I was not really in the mood to experiment much. Now that I’ve had a couple of days to play with the camera, I can do a bit more with it.
The first thing that I wanted to do was to see how it worked while walking. So, Thursday morning I drove into work, parked, and left the parking lot on my usual route to work. I tried a number of shots while walking. It takes some getting used to. It seems a bit unnatural to hold a camera out in front of you rather than looking through a viewfinder. That’s just the old school coming out in me. I will say that the S90′s screen is pretty peppy as far as the update is concerned. As I moved, the camera’s screen updated almost instantly.
Of course, being an older guy who now uses reading glasses all of the time, even as I type this, I have to find the correct distance to hold the camera so that “my” auto focus works! 
The camera does just fine, it’s my eyes that have the problem.
Walking and shooting is sort of like playing one of those fighter pilot video games where you have to get the circle inside of the square and the square on the target to get locked in. With the S90 is a matter of getting the square on the subject, pressing the shutter release half way, and getting a green square. The challenge is to do it while watching the display bob up and down, left and right, all the while trying not to run into anything. I was able to accomplish it a number of times. If you put camera on servo auto focus, as soon as you acquire a subject, it will do tracking for you and then you get a blue square, but I have turned this feature off because it keeps refocusing. I want to compose, move, shoot.
I took this photo while walking back from lunch without even breaking my stride. As you can see, the guy is looking directly at me. What’s he gonna do, spray paint me? Hmmm, I suppose that he could have! Haha.
Ove mentioned in a previous comment that the photos that I took looked flat and needing of a bit of sharpening. True. I took them basically right out of the camera, didn’t push the saturation slider at all, etc. So, I guess you could say that it wasn’t a fair assessment of the camera’s abilities. Everything was shot raw, so things do look a bit dull.
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On the other hand, you see nowadays so much over-sharpened and over-saturated photographs that little softness may be feel like a relief.
Thanks for posting about the experiences with the S90, doesn’t seem to be a bad performer even on the street.
Paul, I’ve had my Canon S90 since January and have worked it hard. It’s amazing. Shot the recent Paul McCartney concert at 1/200 sec with terrific results. (5th row seats helped.)
I missed having all the manual adjustments on my previous P/S so I’m pleased Canon addressed my needs.
Happy shooting.
These images look much better, in my opinion. I can agree with Juha on the saturation and sharpening, this can and is quite often over-made. We who live in the more Northern parts of the World see things a bit less saturated, our eyes are adopted to less light and less contrast, actually a lot like how the images in the last post looked like. In the mornings or evenings, things looks warmer and more detailed also here. I prefer that.
I read a review of the camera today, while I was reading the February issue of the magazine Black+White Photography. They especially liked the camera lens and manual controls, a lot in fact. They concluded in saying that this is as far as technology has came in compact digital cameras, they were very impressed.
Paul, I am thinking about getting the s90 for photographing my kids. I will probably use the hyperfocal technique described towards the end of the blog post. May be useful for street photography applications too:
http://enticingthelight.com/2009/11/13/review-canon-s90-part-2-using-the-camera/
About hyperfocal: does the S90 remember the zoom and manual focus settings when you start it up again? With the LX3 this is often really useful. Also, do you see on screen the range of “in focus” distances when setting the manual focus?
See, perhaps now you don’t need to crave that $5k Leica! I keep reading the S90 is a great little camera.
Ummm, it’s a $7000 camera!
LOL!
Well then you may as well have a D3x! Or just get both!