Canon PowerShot S110

Preview based on a pre-production

When Canon announced the Powershot S90 just over three years ago, it almost single-handedly defined a new class of camera - a genuinely pocketable compact for serious photographers, with RAW format recording, lots of manual control, a larger-than-average 1/1.7" sensor and a fast lens (at least at wideangle). For a couple of years the S90 and its successors - the S95 and S100 - were near-undisputed leaders of the class, and the camera of choice for enthusiasts looking for the ultimate in portability, without sacrificing too much in the way of image quality or manual control.

This all changed with the appearance of the Sony Cyber-shot RX100, a camera whose substantially bigger 20MP 1" sensor in a barely-larger body places it as new king of the hill. Fujifilm has got into the act, too, with today's announcement of the XF1, a beautifully designed compact that uses Fujifilm's clever EXR-CMOS sensor. The upshot of all this is that Canon's latest offering, the S110, enters a considerably more-competitive marketplace than that faced by its predecessors.

An updated S100, with WiFi and Touchscreen

The S110 is a relatively gentle update of the S100, with the guts of the camera - the lens, sensor and image processor - staying essentially the same. So it still uses a 12MP 1/1.7" Canon-made 'High Sensitivity CMOS' sensor, DIGIC 5 image processor, and 24-120mm equivalent lens offering a usefully-fast F2.0 aperture at wideangle, but distinctly slow F5.9 at telephoto. The camera's control layout is identical too, including the excellent and much-copied programmable control dial around the lens.

The main additions are a smartphone-like multi-touch capacitative touchscreen, along with this year's must-have feature, integrated WiFi connectivity. The latter comes at the expense of the S100's built-in GPS module, but the camera can still geo-tag your images by syncing with your smartphone's GPS - assuming you've got one, of course.

The touchscreen offers the usual features we'd expect, including the extremely useful touch-focus that allows you to specify your subject by tapping the screen. A particularly neat addition is the ability to temporarily change the function of the lens control dial by pressing on a 'virtual dial' on the right edge of the screen. For example, in aperture priority mode this means you can quickly switch the dial from controlling the aperture to exposure compensation, a thoughtful addition to the S100's already excellent control system.

The S110's WiFi offers a fairly standard feature set too. You can transfer images to a smartphone or tablet, and upload stills and movies directly to social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. If you're out of range of a WiFi network, you can still upload via your tablet or phone using Canon's CameraWindow app. It's also possible to print wirelessly to WiFi-enabled printers, such as Canon's Selphy CP900 or Pixma models announced alongside the S110.

The S110 also gets what Canon is calling 'ZoomPlus', an enhanced digital zoom that attempts to use content-aware upsampling for better image quality. If this sounds somewhat familiar, that's probably because Sony offers similar-sounding technology called 'Clear Image Zoom' on its recent cameras, including the RX100. Canon's implementation, like Sony's, essentially doubles the camera's zoom range for JPEG shooters, while in principle offering better quality than a standard digital zoom.

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