Canon Digital Ixus 80 IS vs Nikon Coolpix S520

Nick Ross | Jun 17, 2008 11:50 AM
Canon | http://www.canon.com.au
A ListRecommended
RRP: $293 (time of review)
Performance:  5
Features & Design:  6
Value for money:  6
Overall Rating: 
User Rating:  No user ratings.
Two of the best small compacts on the market. Quality differences are on a knife edge, but the Canon wins for superior features and handling.
Both Canon and Nikon have launched new high-end, similar-sized, similarly-priced, compact, eight-megapixel digital cameras which offer similar headline features at identical prices. At the last refresh, face recognition was added to both lines. This time image stabilisation has been introduced. So which to buy?

Features
Anyone who’s used an Ixus will be familiar with the 80 IS’ arsenal. This includes the excellent panorama utility which aids stiching together photos to make single panoramic shots. However, Nikon matches this and even surpasses it by allowing you to pan up or down in addition to left and right.

But, Nikon can’t match Canon’s Colour Accent and Colour Swap features which, in both stills and video, allow you to choose one colour to remain vivid while everything else is left black and white (a la Schindler’s List) or to swap two colours over. It might seem gimmicky, but it’s great fun.

Both have a full complement of pre-set exposures for the likes of beach, snow, underwater and night modes. Macro, exposure compensation, timer and flash options (like slow-shutter and red-eye reduction) are also close at hand. Both offer DPOF printing options and audio/video out via composite and RCA connectors.

Both also sport face detection modes to ensure ‘people pics’ are focussed and exposed properly and lens shift-based image stabilisation which keeps images sharp at about a stop lower than normal. However, Canon’s is superior as you can make it active only when shooting and you can optimise it for panning. The latter only adds vertical stabilisation so you can still pan left or right when shooting.

Canon also offers focus checking features like AF-Point Zoom which enlarges the area of focus so you can to check for sharpness before shooting. Also, Focus Check lets you see quickly view this area once the image is captured. Canon also offers a true focus lock, exposure lock and even flash exposure lock. Nikon simply locks focus when the shutter is half depressed, but the Canon does this too.

Both offer extensive playback features for checking and cropping photographs. Nikon’s D-Lighting feature can help fix poorly-exposed photos by copying and enhancing them, but again Canon offers more options to check focus, levels and even edit video.

But Nikon’s time-lapse feature is superior. Canon’s allows photos to be taken 1 or 2 seconds apart for up to 2hrs before stitching them into a movie. But the Nikon can take pictures up to an hour apart hour for 1800 shots. These can form a time-lapse movie or full-sized, time interval-separated stills.
Neither sports full manual control, but there’s no call for it with cameras this size.

Handling and ergonomics
Few will disagree that the Canon is a prettier camera and not just because it’s available in pretty colours. However, the Nikon looks more masculine. The Canon is faster to start and more responsive when mode-changing and scrolling through pictures, though. Conversely, we found the Nikon’s reciprocal little delays slightly frustrating.

From behind, the control panels look similar, but Canon’s mode switch and superior menus make it easier to navigate. Most of Nikon’s advanced menus are accessed via a single ‘star’ button and we frequently got lost and struggled to get back to picture-taking mode.

But, when it comes to pointing and shooting, both are idiot proof and have the important features all easily to hand.
Both sport bright 2.5in LCDs but Canon‘s 230,000 pixel display is superior to Nikon’s 153,000. Also note that only the Canon has an optical viewfinder.

Performance
It doesn’t take long to realise the Canon is better to use. The focus time is almost always fast while the Nikon too often struggled to decide what to focus on and too often got it wrong. When shooting objects very close up this was exacerbated.

In test conditions there’s very little between the two in terms of lens sharpness, detail and colour saturation. However, the Canon lens was a touch softer in the corners.

Outdoors, in high-contrast environments, the Canon more often made a better fist of focusing and exposure. However, it was more prone to chromatic aberrations (purple fringing) where light met dark.

In macro mode, the Canon’s more-accurate focusing is a boon and we found it easier to get closer and sharper pictures with it. In low light without flash the Nikon’s ISO 2000 rating trumps Canon’s max of ISO 1600: here the Nikon offered superior colour retention and definition but the noise rendered shots barely usable. The Canon’s at 800 were even noisier and unusable.

However, when the flash turned on it was the Canon which offered superior colour saturation while the Nikon’s shots looked relatively blown out (albeit very slightly).

Overall, the Nikon seemed to offer slightly better depth of field, but the Canon’s faster and sharper focusing meant that target was rendered sharper more often. However, picking which camera took which photograph in a blind test would be incredibly difficult.

Movie mode was more clear cut. Both offer DVD-quality 640 x 480 videos at 30fps. But the Canon’s image stabilisation is noticeably smoother than the Nikon’s which suffered from hand shake.

Battery life for both is similar but we recommend turning face recognition and the image stabilisation off most of the time to preserve the battery.

Conclusion
With similar price tags and picture quality balanced on a knife edge we looked elsewhere for a victor. As such, Canon’s superior features, design and handling born from tweaking several revisions of the same camera, tip the balance. It’s incredibly close – these are the best small compacts on the market - but we can’t see anyone being disappointed or frustrated with any aspect of the Canon (bar the time-lapse feature), and so it wins the day.

Total scores:

Canon: Overall: ****** (6 stars)
Nikon:
This article appeared in the June, 2008 issue of PC Authority.