Canon PowerShot S series · announced August 2013

The Canon PowerShot S120: f/1.8, a touchscreen and Wi-Fi in a 29 mm body

In 2013 Canon's pocket enthusiast compact got a slightly brighter lens and a faster processor. Reviewers praised the speed; the battery, the missing grip and the price drew the complaints.

Launched

September 2013

Launch price

£449.99 / $449.99 (see the price note above)³²

Sensor

12.1 MP CMOS

Lens

24–120 mm, 5×

Card

SD, SDHC, SDXC

Battery

NB-6LH

Specs and sources

Meet the camera

The S120 measures 100.2 by 59.0 by 29.0 millimetres and weighs about 217 grams with battery and card.¹ It has no grip to speak of: PhotographyBLOG found a tactile coating and a rubberised thumb rest but no useful hand-grip,³ and Cameralabs noted rounded edges and two surface textures on the front, with nothing protruding.⁴ TechRadar reported the announcement on 22 August 2013 and said the camera would be available from mid-October;² Canon's museum gives September 2013 as the marketing month without naming a market, so the two dates differ. The museum also names it the successor of the S110 and lists the same PowerShot S120 name for Japan, the Americas and Europe.¹

PhotographyBLOG's introduction listed the launch price as £449.99, €529.99 or $449.99, but its conclusion says £449.00 and $449.99, “up £20” in the UK; TechRadar's announcement said £449.99.³² Expert Reviews gave £371 including VAT as the price on its review date, 7 November 2013, about £79 below the launch price (our arithmetic).⁵

Why this one was interesting

A brighter wide end that does not last

TechRadar called the S120 the first S-series camera with an f/1.8 lens.⁶ Cameralabs listed how fast the gain fades: f/1.8 at 24 mm, f/2 at 27 mm, f/2.8 at 34 mm, f/4 at 55 mm, f/5 at 96 mm and f/5.7 at the 120 mm end.⁴ The S110 had been f/2, and Cameralabs called the gain a third of a stop and said it made little difference to exposures or depth of field, while noting that the S120 is thicker (29 mm against 26.9) and heavier (217 g against 198).⁴ At the far end of the zoom, Expert Reviews called the f/5.7 unremarkable.⁵

Speed

The DIGIC 6 processor carried the speed claims. Canon's own figures are 0.10 seconds for autofocus at the wide end and 0.13 seconds of shutter lag, with a burst of about 12.1 frames a second for the first five shots and 9.4 after that.¹ Cameralabs measured about 15.6 frames a second for the first five JPEGs, settling at about 9.3 to 9.4;⁴ Expert Reviews saw 10 frames a second held beyond 100 frames and called it the fastest continuous shooting it had seen from a compact.⁵ The same reviewer found the shot-to-shot time in Auto was 1.4 seconds, against 2.4 for the S110, and that with continuous autofocus very few shots were in focus, only about one in five even when the subject was relatively static.⁵

Touch and Wi-Fi

Cameralabs called tap-to-focus much faster than positioning a focus spot with the rocker controls, as on the Sony RX100 II and the Panasonic LF1, and noted that touch pull-focus in video was new compared with the S110.⁴ PhotographyBLOG was less impressed with the calibration and found that fingers tended to miss small subjects.³ Wi-Fi sent images to phones and computers; Cameralabs, which says Wi-Fi first appeared on the S110, moved roughly 5 MB JPEGs to a phone in about ten seconds,⁴ and both it and Expert Reviews noted there was no remote shooting from a phone.⁴⁵ Location came from the paired phone, not from the camera itself.³ The reviews do not agree on what was new here: Expert Reviews said the screen was now touch-sensitive, while Cameralabs said both the S110 and S120 were.⁵⁴ We have not checked whether the app still pairs with current phones.

Earlier cameras in the line are in our S100, S95 and S90 retrospectives.

The dark: what the new sensor could do

The reviewers disagreed about where the ceiling sat. PhotographyBLOG found JPEGs noise-free from ISO 80 to 800, slightly noisy and a little desaturated at 1600, noisier but usable at 3200, and advised avoiding 12800; it rated its night photograph excellent and said a 15-second maximum shutter speed was long enough for most after-dark shots (Cameralabs, by contrast, lists manually selectable exposures down to 250 seconds), and said the stabiliser worked very well handheld in low light.³⁴ TechRadar called ISO 3200 usable at web and small print sizes, though smoothing showed through the whole range.⁶ Expert Reviews was harder on it: fine detail was lost by ISO 800 and high-ISO crops held up worse than those of the Panasonic LX7.⁵ Cameralabs found the S120 came close to the RX100 II in real-life detail at low ISO, with the Sony pulling ahead above ISO 400 and especially at 800.⁴

Real photographs taken with this camera, from Wikimedia Commons. The sensitivity shown is recorded in each file's own EXIF data.

Like that look? See recent eBay sold listings for this camera ↗

How it drew the picture

PhotographyBLOG called the JPEGs a little soft at default sharpening, saw limited purple fringing, and noted barrel distortion and soft corners at 24 mm, plus noticeable vignetting with the flash at the same setting.³ TechRadar found sharpness across the frame at f/8 and good automatic white balance, even under artificial light.⁶ Expert Reviews disagreed on white balance, calling it unreliable under strong colour casts, and saw a hazy glow around clipped highlights; Lightroom 5 raw conversions added no real detail over the JPEGs.⁵

Photos taken with this camera, from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each picture.

On eBay right now

Live listings for this camera, supplied by eBay and updated automatically. We earn a commission if you buy through them.

The little wins

The back of the S120. · Poudou99 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons

The ring

PhotographyBLOG counted eight presets plus a custom slot on the lens ring, including manual focus, aperture, ISO and white balance, and Cameralabs said a dedicated button lets you reassign it.³⁴

A built-in ND filter

Canon's specification lists a 3-stop ND filter; in one test Cameralabs measured about two stops.³⁴

Star mode

TechRadar described a night-sky mode that also builds star trails and time-lapse movies in the camera,⁶ and Expert Reviews praised the star shots and an hour-long multi-exposure of the sky turning.⁵

Focus peaking

TechRadar noted that manual focus peaking appeared here for the first time in a Canon stills camera.⁶

Software shallow focus

Background Defocus takes two shots and blends them, according to TechRadar;⁶ Cameralabs found it helped only partly and not in macro.⁴

Video that stabilises itself

Expert Reviews found 1080p footage smooth with the five-axis stabiliser and near-silent focus and zoom motors.⁵

Where it let you down

PhotographyBLOG's list of cons: no useful grip, poor battery life, GPS only through a phone and a high price.³ The battery is rated at about 230 shots, up from 200 on the S110, which Expert Reviews still thought low,⁵ and Cameralabs added that it cannot be charged over USB.⁴ The pop-up flash is no longer motorised but pushed down by hand, with a quoted range of 5 metres against 7 on the S110, and there is no hot shoe.⁴ In video, exposure is automatic and focus cannot be changed once recording starts, and Cameralabs found 60p noisier than 30p in dim light.⁴ Expert Reviews disliked the layout of the touch quick menu.⁵

What the reviewers said in 2013

The timeline

• 22 August 2013TechRadar reports the announcement.²
• September 2013Canon's museum lists it as marketed.¹
• 8 October 2013PhotographyBLOG publishes its review.³
• 24 October 2013Cameralabs publishes its review.⁴
• 7 November 2013Expert Reviews publishes its review.⁵
• 23 December 2013TechRadar publishes its review.⁶

Should you buy one now?

Buy one if you want a fast, pocketable camera with full manual control and raw files, and you can live without a grip and a viewfinder. It launched at £449.99 or $449.99;³ what it sells for now is a question for the sold listings, not for us. Before you bid, check these:

• The battery. It uses an NB-6LH, rated by Canon for about 230 shots,³ and there is no USB charging, so you need the charger: Amazon ↗.⁴
• The touchscreen. Tap-to-focus is a main feature, so test it across the whole screen.⁴
• The ring. Turn the lens ring through its presets and check that it clicks.³
• The flash. It is spring-loaded: release it with the side switch and push it down by hand.⁴
• The card. It takes SD, SDHC and SDXC cards; the quoted burst speeds need a suitable one.³

If you are wondering why cameras like this are being hunted down again, we tell that story once, in Pictures that never left the card.

See recent sold prices on eBay ↗Shop on eBay ↗NB-6LH battery ↗

What we could not check

Canon's own specification pages returned an access error to us, so the sensor type, ISO range, screen, card types and battery come from PhotographyBLOG and Cameralabs, and the lens and dimensions from Canon's museum page. We read the introduction, quality-comparison and verdict pages of the Cameralabs review but not its sample-image page. The Cameralabs byline on the page is Ken McMahon, but the text is in the first person and copyrighted to Gordon Laing, so we attribute it to Cameralabs. We have not tested a unit, and several figures (battery, burst speed, ISO range) are Canon's own claims as repeated by reviewers.

Sources

1. Canon Camera Museum: PowerShot S120 (outline, specifications, marketing date, regional names)
2. TechRadar, Canon updates premium compact PowerShot lineup, news by Amy Davies (22 Aug 2013)
3. PhotographyBLOG, Canon PowerShot S120 review by Mark Goldstein (8 Oct 2013)
4. Cameralabs, Canon PowerShot S120 review (24 Oct 2013; byline Ken McMahon on the page, first-person text copyrighted to Gordon Laing; intro, quality-comparison and verdict pages)
5. Expert Reviews, Canon PowerShot S120 review by Ben Pitt (7 Nov 2013)
6. TechRadar, Canon S120 review by Amy Davies (23 Dec 2013; overview, performance and sample-image pages)

Camera photos by Poudou99 (CC BY and CC BY-SA 4.0) and Tatsuo Yamashita (CC BY 2.0); sample photographs are credited under each one, all via Wikimedia Commons. Links to eBay and Amazon are affiliate links.