With the update to OS X today (or yesterday), Apple finally delivered the ability to view raw files from the Canon PowerShot S95. I bought the camera about two months ago, when it first came out, knowing that I wouldn't be able to give my snaps any Aperture love for awhile. But the wait is over, and I'm happily looking at my photos on the magic 27" iMac. It's like seeing a lot of these for the first time, since I never put Canon's shitty converter software on my desktop.
The results are fairly impressive overall, and maybe even better than I expected for such a tiny camera. Tiny lenses and sensors don't always deliver the best results, although for the price of this particular camera, you would hope that it does. Again, my criteria for choosing this camera was size, raw file format and manual control. It might be the smallest in Canon's line to meet all three criteria (and I'm kind of a Canon fanboy, so I didn't really look at the other manufacturers).
At 10 million pixels, there's a lot of data there. Exposure tends to be pretty good in daylight situations, except when it's exceptionally overcast. I didn't have to do much in the way of tweaking to correct for the camera going over/under, but when I did, it was remarkable to see how much dynamic range you could unlock from the raw data. There was one shot I had looking at my car in the apartment garage, which is dark inside and bright outside, and I could see great detail end to end, suddenly seeing both the mountain background on the reflective license plate as well as the stuff in the back of the garage.
The noise is about what you'd expect on a camera that size. ISO 400 is tolerable enough, especially when you resize to Web viewing resolutions, and honestly you can get away with 800. It's a little much for my tastes at 800 when viewed at high resolution, but it's still not horrible.
The only real negative I've found is that in P mode, it doesn't have a minimum shutter speed when the flash is off. Yeah, I suppose that's what shutter priority is for, but there are often situations where you want the faster shutter if you can get it, but are willing to live with somewhat dark exposure if it means not going lower than 1/60, for example.
After carting it around Ohio, constantly in motion, I have to say that it was durable and compact. I had to keep checking my pockets around Cedar Point to make sure I still had it (I remember doing the same thing at Holiday World). I find it easy to turn the auto flash on and off, and adjust the ISO with the lens ring.
Overall, I'm still really pleased with it. It was definitely worth the money and performs to the expectations I had.
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