Canon PowerShot S110 Pro Reviews

The little S110's strongest appeal may be to straight-shooters (photojournalists, documentary photographers, street/candid shooters, available/natural light enthusiasts, and environmental portraitists) because it was clearly designed to be an almost ideal enthusiast camera. This snazzy point and shoot will also appeal to weight/space conscious travelers, Extreme Sports fans, hikers, backpackers, and off road bikers. Anybody who likes small, elegant, precision-built, high performance cameras will immediately fall in love with the Canon Powershot S110. The Canon PowerShot S110 will function nicely as a general purpose digital camera and for only $349 we think you will like the price, too.

With the PowerShot S110, Canon revisits the excellent and easily-recommended S100, tweaking the design to allow wireless photo sharing. It's the fourth iteration of a series that has always performed admirably, offering enthusiast-friendly features in a pocket-friendly body. Our time with the Canon S110 has left us feeling slightly conflicted, though -- perhaps because its predecessors have set the bar so high. On the one hand, there's still a lot to love. The Canon S110's customizable, twin-dial interface is a joy for an experienced photographer, and many of its features -- raw file support, comprehensive manual focusing options, and control over noise reduction and the speed at which Auto ISO sensitivity ramps up -- were clearly added with enthusiasts in mind. Among its new features, the S110's touch screen display is a particularly welcome addition that makes it a breeze to select your subject. And if you're a social creature, the S110's Wi-Fi connectivity can make it simpler to get your photos online without a visit to your computer, although it is still far more clumsy and complex than should be the case.

The price of the S110 is an eye-watering £429.00 / $449.99. As with its predecessor, while some will question such the cost for what is after all a mere compact camera, for many the S110 will make perfect sense both economically and logically - it's still the smallest camera on the market to offer such a wide array of DSLR-like features and excellent image quality to match, topped off by a refined user interface that is a pleasure to use. A year is a long time in the world of cameras, though, and we feel that the S110 has been overtaken by the Sony Cyber-shot RX100, a slightly bigger model with a much larger sensor that delivers even better results. Still, if you want one of the smallest premium compacts around, then the new Canon PowerShot S110 certainly fits the bill.

Anyone who was worried that the successor to the S100 would sacrifice its diminutive dimensions to add more of the things that get enthuiasts excited, such as a hot shoe, accessory port, brighter, longer lens or a flip out LCD screen, can relax. The S110 is the same size and weight as its predecessor. Thankfully, Canon has resisted the temptation to compromise the one thing that defines the PowerShot S range and this is still a camera very much in the pocket compact mould. Instead Canon has retained what was best in the S100 and added a couple of new features in an attempt to stay ahead of the competition. The 3 inch touch screen isn't unique by any means, though it does add a new dimension to the S110's handling making it faster and easier and generally more pleasurable to use. It would be great to see its functionality extended so it could be used for focussing during video recording, but other than that, Canon has done a good job integrating it with the existing physical controls.

The Canon PowerShot S110 is an ideal serious compact camera if you're a big fan of small gadgets. It's pocket-sized, yet packs many features including full manual controls, Wi-Fi and a fast f/2.0 lens. It doesn't have built-in GPS, although Canon have provided their own solution via their smartphone app, but it's nothing you can't get from other similar apps. The Canon app does let you share your images at full size to your smartphone for instant editing and sharing. Image quality is excellent, with good colour reproduction and you can shoot at 10 fps. The Canon PowerShot S110 is recommended.

Top-quality stills and video, plus a hatful of features – our new favourite compact camera

For someone who's looking for something a little better than a point-and-shoot, with more manual features and slightly better photo quality, but still wants the smallest camera possible, the Canon PowerShot S110 is a good choice. But it's not substantially better than its predecessors or the latest generation of competitors, so if you can find them for less, the S100 and S95 are still good options as well.

Even though the high-end compact camera market is hotting up, the Canon PowerShot S110 still delivers in many areas. We’ll get the bad stuff out the way first: the Wi-Fi is poorly implemented, battery life really isn’t up to scratch and, just like its predecessor, there’s still no hotshoe or accessory port. In fact the S110 isn’t wildly different from its predecessor at all. But when the S110 comes good, it does so in style. Not only does it look elegant and is truly pocketable - something ever rarer in high-end compacts - but the 1/1.7-inch sensor also produces great-looking images straight from camera and the f/2.0 aperture at the wide-angle setting is great to have. The touchscreen and improved autofocus combine for the biggest step forward though. Coupled with the lens ring and rear rotational d-pad this camera is more of a joy to use than any S-series before it. We sure do have the blinkers on about Wi-Fi, and the S110 might not be quite the king it once was, but otherwise it’s still a little joy.

The compact, sharp-shooting Canon PowerShot S110 is very similar to its Editors' Choice-winning predecessor, but it's no longer the class leader.