My trust old Canon SD-500 is not good enough to take baby photos. I desperately need a new pocket size camera. A large DSLR is not very convenient to carry around while you have to take care of a baby. I have been waiting for the price drop of Canon S100, which was its flag-ship pocket size camera. It has large 2.0 aperture at 2.0, high ISO 16000 and fast focusing and shutter speed, which is important to capture the moment in all lighting conditions.
The new S110 came out and the S100 drops to $330. The S110 is a newer model, but the image capturing hardware is identical to S100, same aperture size, same sensor, same image processor. The only difference is S110 comes with new useless feature such as wi-fi and touch screen and takes out old useless feature in S100 such as GPS.
The initial batch of S100 has lens retraction problem that the lens may stuck in cold weather due to poor QC. The problem is fixed in newer S100, so I am not too worry about this problem. Although it had affected my friend’s S100 and it’s a pretty bad experience.
The control is pretty much the same canon standard camera pocket size controls. It has two extra ring control that makes selection faster. The most important of all is it can take decent picture without using flash in normal indoor lighting condition at night. The fast focus and shutter response time works almost as well as my big DSLR camera. Perfect to capture the interesting moment of the baby. As usual, there are tons of useless capture mode and filters built-in to the camera, like color shift, fish eye effects, winkle to shoot etc. However there is a few features that I actually found useful, such as high dynamic range, auto facial detection. It also support taking HD video, which is good enough to replace a standalone video camera.
In general, the S100 is a very good camera. Highly recommended. S110 is newer and may have more useless features, but it is also $100 more expensive. Although S100 is no longer the flag-ship pocket camera from Canon, but it definitely gives the best value for the money.