Canon Powershot S3 Is By Ross Maz By Ross Maz on Apr 13, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The canon powersht S3 IS has been an excelent digital camera, the best i have ever had, not saying very much. It is a great camera for taking hundreds of great quality pictures, with 6 mega pixels it takes high quality but not pictures to big to fill your memory card to fast. It is not a small pocket camera like you average coolpix but along with it's large size comes better quality and a ton of features that the coolpix doesn't have. MY favorite part, or spec, of this camera is it's amazing zoom, for the camera's in it's class from three years ago. It has a 12X optical zoom and 4X digital zoom! The additional feature this camera has is "IS", or image stabilizer, which mechanically moves the lense the opposite direction the camera moves, if you shake by accident when taking a picture. The programing is great, it has never ever ever had an error with it and allows you to do things like take videos until the memory card is full. It takes a sd card, which is great because it gives you the option of holding up to 16gb in one chip and then you can bring multiple chips with you or you could get an sd card that holds either sd mini's or sd micro's, both technologies have enabled chips with 16gb so you basically have unlimited memory to store pictures. One aspect of the camera i dislike is how fast it goes through batteries, if you have the volume on and the flip screen on, and you use the flasher for every picrture you could go throught the 4 batteries in an hour. By turning the sound off, closing the flip screen, and not using the flasher very much i am able to get about 4 hours out of the batteries. For durablility it doesn't do to well, just becasue of it's big size and weight, if you were to drop it you might get lucky once but the second time it is done. Comparitativly this camera was excelent in all respects to the other camera's in it's "class", of other big camera's that are just barely not professional. Today it is begining to get outdated with other camera's like it with 16X optical zoom and continuously better lenses.