Canon Powershot S90 Samples

Here are sample crops from an outdoor scene at each of the Canon Powershot S90's ISO settings. Next to each of these crops, there is a crop from the Fuji Finepix F200 EXR at the same ISO setting. This is the flagship Fuji ultra-compact which currently produces the best image quality of any fixed lens camera. Both these have manual controls and stabilized wide-angle lenses.

Images below are all unmodified 100% crops from their respective cameras. Only the ISO sensitivity was set, the remaining settings were left on automatic or on their default values.

These crops help determine which ISO settings can be acceptably used on these cameras. As noise increases, most cameras compensate with noise reduction which introduces softness. The result is that, while you can partly reduce noise at the expense of details, the maximum acceptable print size gets smaller as ISO is increased. The point at which a print become unacceptably noisy is a matter of personal taste.

Canon Powershot S90	Fuji Finepix F200 EXR
ISO 80
ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 800
ISO 1600	ISO 1600
ISO 3200	ISO 3200
With the Powershot S90 and G11, Canon took a bold step to reduce the resolution of their flagship cameras from 14 to 10 megapixels. This is exactly where it pays off. For the first time, an ultra-compact is getting close in ISO performance to a Fuji F-series camera. In this scene the Canon Powershot S90 starts out with a little more noise than the Fuji but by ISO 800 when the F200 becomes noisier, the S90's noise-reduction works to keep the subject more recognizable.	ISO 6400
	ISO 12800