Canon PowerShot S120 12.1 MP CMOS Digital Camera with 5x Optical Zoom and 1080p Full-HD Video..
Grab Now Canon PowerShot S120 12.1 MP CMOS Digital Camera with 5x Optical Zoom and 1080p Full-HD Video By Canon
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426 of 437 people found the following review helpful.
By Just Chris
Just got this camera and have less than 100 pictures through it and although every year I buy one of these and end up returning it, it looks like this "S" might be a keeper finally.
Like most of its predecessors it's built very well, feels good in the hand, and most of the buttons have good feedback. It has gotten a little more rounded over the years but I like it, square camera with smooth edges that don't annoy me in the pocket.
Out of the pocket this camera is probably adjustability-overkill for most people that haven't dared of taking their camera out of AUTO mode. Whether you like shooting in AUTO or you do choose to leave AUTO behind, the S120 rewards you with a very fast interface, fast response (focus/shutter), and the ability to view and share your images across other devices quickly.
I am a Canon guy. That should not be missed here because I am a little biased, but I have an iphone(5) for my day to day camera. My weekend camera is a Canon 6D and a bag of L lenses. I bought the S120 to bridge the gap between the two. I am not a professional, but sometimes I want professional pics without using my phone or lugging a big DSLR kit around with me - enter the S120.
With the S120 Canon FINALLY offers a simple camera that seems to do everything I want well. What do I want?
- Ability to capture amazing pictures without carrying 20# of lenses with me.
- Ability to hand my wife/kids a camera that they can use too.
- Fast power up, fast focus, fast capture.
- Great video if the situation calls for it, on the fly, no delay.
- EASY way to transfer pictures to my phone (for when I do want to send them elsewhere).
- Canon menus, because they make sense to me.
It does all of these in my opinion, quite well.
If you are looking for a camera that outshines just about anything else on the shelf under 700$ and can avoid bulking your pants pocket - this is the one.
Whats in the box:
- Canon S120 camera.
- Canon (NB6-LH) battery.
- Canon wall charger (CB-2LY).
- Canon wrist cord.
- Registration documents.
- Warranty info.
A couple other things I wanted to mention...
WiFi -- It's actually useful now! This model features a new wifi setup for transferring pictures to your smartphone. I have had this on (2) other units (S110 and EOS 6D) and never use it because it's a pain. With this model I just go into "play" mode on the camera, press the wifi button (up on the D pad) , it immediately asks what I want to connect to, I select "smartphone" and it says start the phone application and point it to this hotspot. Once I do that, I am on the phone browsing pictures. Scrolling through images (large JPEG) on the camera is pretty quick, downloading is pretty quick, disconnecting and getting back to shooting is just as quick. Now you can literally turn wifi on, send a specific image over to your phone, turn wifi off, in the matter of a couple seconds and a few button clicks.
I won't go into what the old way was, because if I could remember it I would actually use it!
RX100 vs S120 -- Just before the S120 was announced I finally broke down and bought an RX100 (new). Not the M2 model but the original, for 600$. I loved the pictures it took, they were amazing amazing images.
Compared to the S120 (in circumstances so far) they are possibly a little better comparing auto mode to auto mode. What I like about the Canon vs the Sony is the Canon seems to capture more how I see things as opposed to the Sony which wanted to make everything look like a carnival if left untouched (it liked to make all the colors exotically vibrant from my perspective). If this were just about images there would have been some tough decisions to make and hairs to split over this.
The size and weight of RX100 to S120 it's no contest:S120. I can put the S120 in a pair of khaki's and go sit in meetings or walk around all day with no worries. The RX100 just felt too darn heavy, and it's larger lens tube sticking out from the front was annoying getting in and out of pockets. The S120 is still a true pocket-friendly camera is what I am getting at.
Build quality-wise both feel like finely crafted machines. The S120 will remind you of other point and shoot cameras and its finish is something I would feel ok with putting in a bag with no case. The RX100 felt like some sort of surgical tool, I mean in a good way - but I felt like putting down on a desk would damage the desk or possibly the finish on the camera. Another strange thing is the S120 feels good in the hand and has some heft but nothing bad. The RX100 felt a little heftier but in a way that I felt if I dropped it, it's life was over - it was just waiting for an opportunity to spill its guts. I would expect the S120 to take a small hit or some tumbling without ending it.
Cost - Although money can be irrelevant to most photographic geeks when it comes to "getting the shot" , I didn't understand why the Sony was hundreds more. The "why" of this is in other parts of the review here so I won't get into it more. I will just say I had a $1,000 budget for my perfect point and shoot, and now I have 550$ to go spend on something else.
Software - I left this for last because I suspect this is where Canon bias comes in. It is also something I suspect is different in the newer model Rx-100(M2) so may not be as relevant. The S120 UI is quick and also very efficient. The RX-100 by comparison was a little slow, and (at least for me) I never felt like I could quickly get to the settings I wanted to without forcing some customization. Neither is over-glitzy or annoying to use, but the Sony one just felt like it was fighting me sometimes when I would change something and then have to re-find it.
I hope you enjoyed this review and I will update it as relevantly as is feasible.
If there is more you'd like to see added or something I missed please comment and let me know, and thanks for reading this!
-Chris
88 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
By Alex B.
I love this little camera. My previous camera was a Canon S100, and I loved it, too. But I really wanted the wi-fi functionality so that I could share pictures with friends and family at moment's notice and not have to wait until I got home (which, half the time I would forget to do anyway). The wi-fi feature works very well. You can upload photos directly to your phone or tablet by connecting to the camera's built-in wi-fi hotspot. Or you can upload pictures directly to the web by connecting the camera to a wi-fi hotspot with internet connectivity. Both ways work great.
Before this one I bought a Sony RX100M II. Great little camera, but it wasn't really pocketable (yes, you could fit it into a jeans pocket, but you would probably hurt yourself if you tried walking with it). Also, the menu wasn't as intuitive or smooth. Plus, it was rather slow to navigate between images in playback mode, not something I was used to since owning the S100, which was very quick.
You can't go wrong with either camera, and it really depends on what you value more. For me, the size and weight of the camera was more important than slightly better image quality of the Sony. I wanted a camera that I could bring with me anywhere and not worry about it, and this one is perfect for that.
I had both cameras to compare side by side. In terms of portability, even though the size & weight look pretty similar on paper, it's no contest when it actually comes down to carrying the camera - Canon S120 wins. If I was going to carry the Sony, it would always be in hand or in a case. That defeats the whole point of having a pocketable camera. I might as well carry a larger & better camera if I'm going to carry it in a case.
While the image quality was slightly better in the RX100M II (especially in low light), it wasn't *that* much better. After carrying around both cameras for a week, I definitely prefer the Canon in terms of portability. I could slip it into my jeans or jacket pocket and forget about it - not something I could say about the Sony.
Both cameras are built like a tank - fantastic build quality. However, I think that the Canon would probably survive a fall onto concrete/marble floor better than the Sony, which has an articulating screen & huge lens.
Pros of the Canon S120:
- Small, lightweight, & most importantly pocketable!!!
- Quite a bit cheaper than the Sony RX100M II ($450 vs $750)
- Wider angle (24mm vs 28mm)
- Longer optical zoom (5x vs 3.6x)
- Touch screen is very nice - useful for manual focusing, menu navigating, picture browsing, etc
- Faster, smoother, and more intuitive user interface - the Sony user interface felt much slower
- Better optical stabilization - I noticed that I got more sharp pictures hand-held at night than with the Sony (on auto mode)
- Built-in neutral density filter - can do really cool motion blur effects during daytime
- Better automatic mode - closer to the way I want the pictures exposed - skin tones in particular are more natural looking
- Very cool built-in HDR mode
- Continuous 9.8fps burst mode until the card fills up - that's awesome! (very few cameras have this)
- Clicky selector ring around the lens - the Sony also has one, but it's smooth (no click feedback), and therefore harder to select settings accurately. I found myself under-rotating or over-rotating the ring when trying to select settings on the Sony.
Pros of the Sony RX100M II that I will miss:
- Sweep panorama - great feature - I don't get why Canon still didn't get this one
- 20MP - awesome detail - you can really use digital zoom with so many pixels
- Huge 1" sensor - better quality pics in the dark, but not *that* much better
- Longer battery life - no big deal as extra batteries are small enough to carry
- Extremely fast focus & shutter - a little faster than the Canon
- Long flash range - you can also manually tilt the flash to bounce off of the ceiling
- Articulating screen - can tilt the screen in different directions
- NFC quick connect feature - very quick tap & connect on some NFC enabled phones
95 of 100 people found the following review helpful.
By Mark Sanchez
The S120 is a fantastic pocket camera to use when you don't want to carry around your DSLR. For the last couple years the camera I use is a Canon DSLR. Even though I have 2 older ELPH's, I always have used my DSLR until now. The Canon S120 is pretty amazing for a pocket sized camera and works perfect as the camera to grab when you don't want to carry the big DSLR. There are definitely some advantages and disadvantages worth pointing out.
I've been using the S120 for 1 week now. From power up to 1st shot takes barely 1 second. Shutter lag is slightly longer than my DSLR (T3i), but hardly noticeable and completely acceptable. I really like the amazing resolution on the LCD. It almost makes up for not having a viewfinder since I can really see the focus on my shots, but the downside of course is that framing is so much harder without a viewfinder, but that's the tradeoff of a point and shoot. The pictures look fantastic to me. Low light shooting is pretty good with the lens at its shortest focal length and f1.8. Zoomed shots in low light are pretty dark even with high ISO and should be steadied with a tripod or support. Shots in good light are quick to focus and sharp when hand-held. The built in flash absolutely stinks compared to speedlites, but such is the way with tiny built-in's. I wish Canon would give you off-camera wireless like they do on their new DSLR's.
I don't have the STM lens capability, so this not may be true to everyone, but I enjoy using the S120's video shooting much more than my DSLR despite the sensor size advantage due to contrast detection's focus advantage while shooting. The focus and optical zoom is sharp and silent while shooting. The 60p frame rate makes shots look a little artificially smooth, but things look very realistic too.
The menu system is good and familiar to me as a Canon user. I've tried out some of the filters and effects, and they work pretty well and are neat to use. Bracketing and HDR options are great and very quick, as is the background blur mode thanks to the very fast shooting speeds. Speaking of which, if you set a continuous shooting shutter, the speeds are as fast as advertised. I'm using an older Class 10 SD card, made by Lexar, that isn't fast enough for my DSLR's video capture, but works great for all shooting modes on the S120. So I'll say you definitely don't need as fast of a card in this camera as you do in your DSLR.
Wi-Fi setup allows access to Canon's Image Gateway, the smart phone app (Canon Camera Window), and ability to transfer files directly through a Wi-Fi access point. Initial setup take a little time, but once set, it's easy to use the Wi-Fi modes. Battery life is a little short. Granted I spent a lot of time playing around with settings and not shooting, but I could easily burn through a battery in an afternoon. I'd rather have a compact camera with a small battery though, so it's a fair tradeoff. The size of the camera can't be beat for this level of camera. There's quite a bit of mass to the solid construction, but it could stay in my pocket all day.
I'm very impressed with the S120. The initial price is pretty high and I debated just getting the S110 and saving $100, but in the end I decided that this was going to replace the use of my DSLR in a lot of circumstances, so worth paying a little extra. The S120's compact size, 1/1.7" sensor, f1.8 lens, fast shooting speeds, and features focused on DSLR users (like RAW and the selector ring) really won me over.
Best of the convertable Windows 8 laptop tablets, 2nd gen model with much improved battery life, highly recommended
Needs a lot of work to be a good untrabook