The PowerShot S3 is an image-stabilized compact camera that offers an ultrazoom (12x) optical lens and a 2" LCD that twists out and away from the camera body. The most important part of the camera is its overall feel when you're holding and shooting with it. The folks at Canon have used their design experience to create a compact camera that feels and performs like a digital SLR. This is especially true when it comes to the camera controls, which Canon has made accessible in the form of buttons on the body, rather than following the popular design philosophy of burying them in LCD menus. This means that it's easier to make changes quickly when shooting. For those who like scene presets, you'll find 20 of them covering a diverse range from the new Sports mode to Color Accent. When I was taking some sample shots, I noticed that the camera produced some chromatic aberration (also called purple fringing) at the higher zoom levels-not unexpected with an ultrazoom.

The Canon S3 is also a serious movie camera. The movies are recorded in Motion JPEG (AVI) with stereo sound (no kidding!). The quality of the movies that I shot (640x480 at 30 fps) equaled those shot with my camcorder. The difference is that in Movie mode, the SD memory card fills up pretty quickly. For example, a 1-GB SD card can hold about 8 minutes of video, so have a handful of the cards available if you want to include a lot of movie clips of your vacation.

The image stabilization (IS) works as well as its competitors'. Probably the greatest complaint that users have about IS is unrealistic expectations about what the feature can do. When shooting under low-light conditions, the Canon IS system allows you to shoot about one or two f-stops lower than possible without IS turned on.

The images that the camera produces are vivid and crisp. It has a pop-up flash that's fairly powerful although it doesn't pop up automatically. My complaints about the S3 are few: I was surprised to discover that it doesn't come with rechargeable batteries (it runs on four AA batteries) and I found the LCD a little difficult to see on a sunny day. Another disappointment was that such a full-featured camera doesn't offer a RAW image file format.

The camera has a $499.99 price tag but I was able to find it on the Web for as low as $424.

499.99 Mac/Windows

That's not to say it isn't a great camera. If you've never used one of these Cyber-shot cameras, they fall into the compact, image-stabilized category of digital camera that has a very large (12x) optical zoom capability (36-432mm equivalent). When you combine the great optical zoom with a 7.2-megapixel sensor (3072x2304 pixels), you have a serious camera that can do just about anything you ask of it.

The first time I tested the camera, it had a nice SLR feel to it and that's because Sony put most of the often-accessed controls where they can be reached easily rather than buried deep in a menu. Unlike a TTL viewfinder in an SLR, the H5 uses a 200,000-pixel electronic viewfinder (EVF) that produces a sharp image-although it would be nice if it were larger. The new 3" LCD screen on the back can also be used to compose a shot even on a bright day.

The overall operation of the camera is excellent. The focus mechanism is generally fast for this class of camera except that it seemed a tad slow at the extreme zoom lens settings. The Cyber-shot DSC-H5 has five White Balance presets but during testing, the Auto White Balance worked so well, I didn't need to use the presets at all. The flash is one of the best in its class with a reach of between 22-30', while the colors of the flash images are perfectly corrected and consistent. One problem faced by all compact cameras with extreme zoom factors is chromatic aberration (also called purple fringing). The H5 exhibits more than its fair share of this problem but I saw it only on high-contrast, backlit images. The image stabilization of the camera is impressive and allows you to achieve sharp images at several stops lower than you could achieve without it. The Movie mode of the camera works as well as can be expected-great for short flicks but it won't replace your camcorder.

For a non-SLR camera the Cyber-shot DSC-H5 has everything you need to take professional quality photos,almost. The only format that the camera supports is JPEG. With the increasing popularity of the RAW format it's surprising that the H5 doesn't offer RAW or another non-lossy format, such as DNG or TIFF.

499.95 Mac/Windows