100% crop of photo taken at ISO 400. Click for larger view.

Many photo enthusiasts like me eventually move to a digital single lens reflex camera for one primary reason: they excel at high ISO performance. Yes, there are other important reasons to buy a DSLR, but I’ll stick to the topic of sensitivity.

Until recently, few compact digital cameras could even come close to producing the clean images, with little or no noise, like a DSLR. Fortunately, that’s changing.

Among a handful of compact cameras that produce images close to DSLR quality is the Canon Powershot s90. To be fair, the images are still not on par with high ISO images produced by a DSLR. But they are definitely outstanding compared to many other compact cameras. The quality is good enough that some may forgo buying a DSLR.

The sample photos on this page were taken in very poor light, “perfect” conditions for judging the quality of high ISO performance.  [Visit Gail's pbase gallery to see additional high ISO photos taken with the s90.]

A word about the s90’s Auto ISO mode

In recent years, many compact digital cameras offer both an Auto ISO and High Auto ISO mode. Unfortunately, the s90 only has an Auto ISO mode so, when in this mode, the camera will automatically selects from a large range of ISO numbers: Auto, ISO 80, 100, ISO 125, 160, 200, 250, 320, 400, 500, 640, 800, 1000, 1250, 1600, 2000, 2500, 3200.

100% crop of photo taken at ISO 800. Click for larger view.

You’d think a camera that has decent high ISO performance and goes to ISO 32000 would have an High Auto ISO option. It doesn’t. It simply has Auto ISO, which automatically selects anything from ISO 80 to 3200. It often chooses an ISO number higher than I prefer, even it bright light and especially outside in the shade.

Because of this, I rarely set the camera to Auto ISO. I manually choose the ISO number and watch other setting changes based.

I’ll probably use Auto ISO for night scenes, but even then I’ll carefully watch what the camera selects and then make my own choice.

Low Light mode - Low light mode is a scene mode and functions in a similar manner to the Auto High ISO mode found on many newer digital cameras. However, there is no way to select the focus points so the camera uses multi-point focus AiAF face detection, resulting in a loss of user control wanting more precise focus.

Visit Gail’s pbase gallery for sample photos taken with the Canon s90.