New samples from Canon Powershot S90

Dpreview.com has published a gallery of S90's photos: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0909/09091802canons90gallery.asp

The pictures don't look exciting to me – noisy, not very sharp and with quite a bit of purple fringing. PF was a plague of my old G5 and I'm happy that G10 almost doesn't have it. It's an unpleasant surprise to see it again.

Of course, it's good that ISO 800 and 1600 are usable now, but at low ISO pixel quality isn't any better than G10's, maybe even worse, and it's 10 MP, not 14.7 Since S90 and G11 share the same sensor and image processor, I expect similar quality from G11. Probably better, because of sharper lens, but not MUCH better.

Of course, those are JPEGs from the camera, not RAW conversions, but Canon's in camera processing is so good that I wouldn't expect much better results from computer RAW conversions. Maybe better and less aggressive noise reduction and little more detail.

So the only actual advantage of the new G11 is flip-out screen, which is very useful, but cannot really justify an upgrade from G10. Soon we will see whether my conclusions are true...