Canon S2 IS, one-sentence review

[mmcirvin]

Excellent camera, craptacular host software that I installed because of the bogus dire warnings that it was necessary for proper camera operation (this might be true on Windows for all I know) and that I will never use again.

Comments

[piehead.livejournal.com]

I don't have that camera, but it almost certainly will "just work" with the Windows XP automatic camera transfer wizard, or it will appear as a device or drive in Explorer than you can drag files from.

My Canon SD400 also had some warning, but I never even bothered installing its software.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's probably the same software. I never bothered installing Nikon's with my old camera because everybody hated it so much.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Unfortunately, the one thing I haven't yet figured out how to do without the host software is download movies directly from the camera. iPhoto will handle photos fine, but I can't get the camera to just mount as a volume like a civilized device would so I can pull off the movies; I have to use this idiotic software written by people with an extremely imperfect grasp of both Mac idioms and English idioms.

I might have to get an SD reader to do this properly. Somehow, it seems wrong that I'd have to.

On the bright side, unlike my old camera this thing can do USB2, so it'll motivate me to get a USB2 card for my computer so I can do higher-speed transfers.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

... download movies directly from the camera

"Image Capture" will do this.

(frozen)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha! Somehow I'd imagined that it had been obsoleted by iPhoto. Thanks!

[iayork.livejournal.com]

In fact I often launch Image Capture just to collect photos, instead of iPhoto. Image Capture is much faster (presumably because iPhoto takes time to organize and rearrange the photos as well as downloading them), and since my camera is running down batteries while it's swapping photos, the extra little step of moving the files into iPhoto manually is worth the trouble.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...by the way, the user interface of the camera by itself is actually a joy to use, so far. It must have been designed by entirely different people. I love that so many functions are actually exposed as dial modes or external buttons; no hunting around in menus. My mother had a little Nikon 2500 identical to mine, and over years of heavy use she was never able to figure out how to enter movie mode--and it took me a while to figure it out myself. This thing has a red button that does it.

Speaking of which, its video capability is extremely impressive for something primarily marketed as a still camera. I shot about a minute of Radka the cat running around, was messing around with output to my TV and was shocked to discover that you can do simple video cuts on the camera itself. Probably many semi-modern digicams have this, but it was new to me.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

You can also take photos while filming (though the movie stops recording for a moment), so you almost have the best of both worlds.

I like the UI of the camera, too, though there is some menu-shuffling left at time. The full auto mode, though, generally works pretty well.

My only gripe about the camera is the relatively slow flash.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It doesn't feel that slow to me--the flash on my old camera was glacial, and the shutter lag was colossal even without the flash.

The flip-up flash may not be as good as a hot-shoe flash unit (I know people complain about the lack of a hot shoe on this camera) but it's nice after experiencing the dinky built-in flashes on most digicams. It's far enough from the lens that I can actually take flash photos of cats and sometimes not get brilliant demonic eye glare.

I was considering getting the Canon A700, which is lighter than other cameras in the A series in part because it only takes two AAs. But apparently the A700 pays for that with a flash that can often take four or five seconds to charge up between shots.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that if you get a camera, you also get a card reader for it. It just makes everything that much simpler and smoother, because cameras *always* manage to mess up something with the picture transfer. With the card reader, you can do things exactly the way you want them.

And Canon's interface design in general is pretty good. I've been very happy with my old Canon Ixus 400 (whatever it's called in the US), and recently my new Ixus 800.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here they're called "Digital ELPHs", for some reason.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually, Image Capture seems to have done the trick for me.

But I might yet get one anyway, as a convenience. My old Nikon took CF cards and I have a CF reader, but it was actually less necessary in that case because the camera had a file-transfer mode in which it would just mount as a volume and act exactly like a card reader. iPhoto could still handle picture transfers in the usual manner. Of course I set it to that mode on the first day I had it and never used anything else.

Then the remaining issue is just the debate endlessly hashed out on digital photography forums about whether the wear and tear of removing and reinserting the memory card is better or worse than the extra battery consumption during image transfer.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

What about the wear and tear on the tiny flappy little rubber cover that digital cameras are required by law to have covering the USB and A/V connectors, even the most expensive digital pro cameras, and that feels like it's just about to fall off even when new?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The manual seemed to be very insistent that, though you could use the camera on both Windows XP and Mac OS X without the Canon software, you needed to have it installed before plugging in the camera for the first time. One of the things the host software can do is mess with some of the camera settings (you can so some pointless customization of the menu themes, for instance), so I was wondering if there was some sort of initialization process on the camera that it had to do.

But not even that makes any sense, since as far as I can tell the installer didn't install any kernel extensions, startup items, frameworks, etc., or modify automatic plug-in behavior, so I don't think it did anything at all when I just plugged in the camera.

The software seemed very generic. I noticed that the (very dumb) installer installed a bunch of stuff having to do with camera RAW, even though this camera doesn't have a RAW mode. The one thing I might conceivably want to use would be the pano stitching utility, though I don't know how good it is.

[mutantlog.livejournal.com]

I've had some decent experience with their stitching utility, especially when I run out of RAM on a poorly equipped PC with AutoStitch. The one potentially useful thing in the host software (assuming that it's the same as the A60 software) is that it lets you adjust the owner field which will sit in one of the Canon specific EXIF tags of your pictures. Other than that, and setting a custom startup screen, ignore it.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Don't even bother with the stictching utility. I can tell without ever having seen it that it is nowhere near as powerful or produces anywhere near as good results as Hugin, and the rest of the set of open-source panorama stitching tools. In true open-source fashion, it has a horrible interface, but the results are excellent.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hey, I didn't even know they finished porting Hugin to OS X. Last I checked it was in its infancy...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...man, you weren't kidding about either the power or the suck.