Canon PowerShot S120 Pro Reviews

There's no question that the Canon PowerShot S120 is one of the best compact cameras money can buy. It has the performance, features and image quality of a high-end advanced compact with the style and portability of a pocket snapshot camera. It handles well, its complexity is made fun and easy to use thanks to a well-designed control system, and it even looks good, although it would be nice if it came in other colours. Unfortunately it also has a price tag to match its abilities, and is significantly more expensive than some very similar rivals. If you're looking for one camera that can do it all, from advanced creative photography to social snapshots on a night out, it's definitely one you should be looking at, but whether or not you decide it's the camera for you will probably come down to that illustrious Canon brand name in the end.

The Canon PowerShot S120 is a rather modest update of last year's S110 camera, principally making things faster and adding a few new features and shooting modes into the now familiar mix. We like the faster auto-focus and burst shooting speeds, while the slightly faster maximum aperture of f/1.8 helps in low-light situations, but overall there's not too much to tempt S110 owners to upgrade to this new model. This new model still lacks a useful hand-grip, the battery life continues to be pretty shocking, GPS is only available via pairing with a smartphone, and the price remains sky-high. Image quality also remains excellent, thankfully, with a perfectly usable ISO range of 80-1600 and fast f/1.8 maximum aperture, albeit only at the 24mm wide-angle lens setting, making the S120 very well-suited to low-light, hand-held photography. It's also possible to capture the blurred backgrounds and sharp subject that most compacts struggle to achieve, while the 5x zoom offers a longer reach than some rivals, albeit with a somewhat inevitable increase in the maximum aperture to a rather slow f/5.7 at 120mm. Full 1080p video at 60fps with continuous auto-focusing, stereo sound and full use of the zoom is the icing on the imaging cake.

As it stands though the S120 can still be squeezed into most pockets which keeps it unique against most of its competition - indeed only the Lumix LF1 challenges it in this regard. And if it is a genuinely pocketable enthusiast-class compact you're after then you should be comparing the S120 very closely against the LF1 and also seeing what that extra 1cm of thickness gets you from the RX100 II. But for me even against such rivals the S120 remains a highly compelling camera and one I'd be very happy to carry around as a backup to a system camera or even by itself for many situations. As such it remains Highly Recommended.

The Canon PowerShot S120 is a steady upgrade of last year's S110, with a slightly faster aperture, faster continuous shooting and a higher resolution screen. This might not be enough to tempt S110 owners to upgrade, but the star trail feature does offer something unique and the results we achieved during testing are quite impressive. There are some issues with battery life, it has a CIPA rating of just 200 shots and you're likely to see this reduce when using the Wi-Fi to share your images. The S120 also lacks GPS, but given the battery life, you probably would avoid using it anyway - you can use your smartphone instead to add GPS data. Overall, the S120 packs a number of superb features and is a premium compact camera we are happy to highly recommend.

Fantastic videos, above-average photos – a strong contender but not the best

The Canon PowerShot S120 delivers impressive image quality in a compact package with Raw shooting capability, but it's not quite an Editors' Choice.

If you're looking for a small, pocketable yet high-end compact camera that produces cracking images then there aren't many other places to look than directly at the PowerShot S120 or Panasonic Lumix LX7. The Canon does itself justice in being a decent all-rounder. It may be small in the hand, but it's big on features and its image quality easily rivals any models of a similar sensor size. In fact it probably betters them. We're big fans of the customisable lens control ring too and the S120 is a true step ahead of its S110 predecessor in the performance stakes. If you're a few generations of S-series behind and are thinking of sticking with the brand then now will probably feel like a good point to jump on board. But it's not quite perfect. We'd like to see a stronger battery performance, there's some overexposure in shots that's a bit of a nuisance, while the Wi-Fi mode - while certainly better - needs to be polished up before it's a perfectly smooth runner. Not to mention that it's just as pricey as ever, but that's an inevitability. Even so, it puts the S120 firmly in the Fujifilm X20 ballpark and makes that purchase decision that much tougher if you're a brand new buyer. In that instance it'll probably come down to physical size. And if small is top of your list then the S120 is very likely to be the number one choice. And with good reason: it's a truly great high-end compact camera.