hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

You know you've come up with a pretty good digital camera design if you can facelift it over and over and it is still going strong after years. The newly presented Canon PowerShot S60 might stand in the shadows of the disappointing, but new-from-the-grounds-up PowerShot Pro 1 and the rather silly PowerShot S1 IS, but it is suited to be the real workhorse in this family. Based on the nearly three years old PowerShot S40, trusted here at Industrial Night and Magic, it addresses some key weaknesses of its S40/S45/S50 predecessors:

Usability: The very poorly designed five way controller and the tiny zoom lever have been replaced by a normal 4 way direction pad, a separate SET button and a larger zoom lever. Also, the annoying spring loaded play mode switch that requires to be pushed three seconds before switching from capture to play mode has been replaced by a standard button. More important:

Finally a wide angle lense. 28-100 mm equiv lenses are hard to find in cameras of this size, as most vendors go for zoom lenses that start somewhere around 35 mm equiv (easier = cheaper to engineer). This seems to be a lens unit new from the grounds up and I hope it will suit the well-known 5 megapixel sensor of this camera well. Background: the S40, S45 and S50 all shared the same lense unit which has been designed for the S40's 4 megapixel sensor. For its small lense diameter, it performs quite well. The S45 used the very same lens-sensor-combination, as it has been a smaller update (multifield AF), but the S50 has been nothing more than a new sensor bolted to the old, now overstrained lense, a not too convincing combination (marketing move).

But sometimes, marketing constraints can even have a positive side. If you have to keep a distance in specs to the next higher model (at least on the paper), you can improve a product where it counts. If the S60 lense performs well in terms of barrel distortion and vignetting and is well tuned to the already known sensor, the CCD could finally play out its qualities and the Sx0 series would have reached maturity (even though I assume that a number of smaller weaknesses have remained unaddressed as they touch basic design issues). I am eager to see how the detailed review at dpreview.com will turn out.