Another camera to be reviewed by Think Camera recently was the Canon PowerShot S3 IS which scored brownie points for its ergonomically designed body and intuitive menu, its swivel and tilt LCD and the onboard high quality lens with image stabilization. What they didn’t find hot was the small LCD and the lack of RAW option.

The Canon S3 IS uses a 6 Mega pixel CCD and has an ISO range of 80 – 800. It features a F2.7-3.5, 12X optical zoom lens which is equivalent to 36 - 432 mm. The flash has a working range of 0.5 - 5.2 m at wide-angle and 0.9 - 4.0 m at telephoto and includes a 2.5" rotating screen LCD with 115,000 pixels. The camera for an enhanced performance includes the DIGIC II chip and also supports the PictBridge system for direct printing. The movie mode is excellent and the camera can record high-quality VGA (640 x 480 pixels) movie mode at 30 fps and increase it to 60 fps in QVGA (320 x 240) movie mode. Available My Color playback modes include Vivid Blue, Vivid Green, and Vivid Red; lighter and darker skin tones, as well as options for creating black & white, sepia, neutral and positive film effects.

In the end the website writes “There are similarly-priced digital SLRS that have better performance; pay more and you’ll get better image quality too. But they’ll be bigger and more complicated. The combination of the excellent zoom, good image stabilisation and wide range of features and settings make the PowerShot S3 IS a flexible camera in a surprisingly compact package. That makes it more disappointing that there’s no RAW option (although you can create a custom colour mode).”