Canon Digital Camera S500

With its super-slim body, light weight, versatility, and excellent picture quality, the 5-megapixel Casio Exilim EX-S500 is a camera you can carry everywhere. What's more, the hot colors and "electrical coating" ensure you'll take it out of your pocket as often as possible to show it off (and maybe shoot some photos, too). It doesn't dethrone our Editors' Choice, the 4-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD300 Digital Elph, but it certainly comes close.

The EX-S500 sports a 6.2- to 18.6-mm lens (a 35-mm equivalent of 38 mm to 114 mm) with f/2.7 to f/5.2 at its widest aperture over the zoom range. But unlike the recently reviewed Fuji FinePix Z1, the lens protrudes (as does the Canon SD300's). The EX-S500 gives you 8.3MB of on-board memory, displays images on a large 2.2-inch LCD, and lets you record MPEG-4 video clips until your memory card is full. It weighs in at just over 4 ounces, and measures 3.5 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD). That thinness makes the EX-S500 incredibly portable, and the rounded edges give it a beautifully sleek look.

The EX-S500's beauty isn't just skin-deep, either. The camera has more than 30 Best Shot scene modes for stills and video, all accessible by clicking the dedicated BS button and selecting the mode you want. The Best Shot menu also includes brief descriptions of each mode. Though the scene modes were varied and quite useful, we did find one omission here—we think there should be a panorama or photo-stitching mode. The EX-S500 also doesn't have an optical viewfinder or any manual modes, two features important to advanced users. The SD300 includes both.

Our simulated-daylight test shots showed a minimal amount of noise. The camera performed wonderfully in color matching, with dead-on saturation. There was a small amount of fringing, but nothing that would overwhelm the picture quality. Overall, it had excellent exposure and really captured our still-life scene's subtleties. Our only complaint is that the color could be a bit richer.

In the flash shot, we found good flash coverage, but the flash was a little too strong at times. We found some non-colored noise in a few areas of our test image, but again, nothing that really affected the quality of the shot. As in the simulated-daylight shot, we saw excellent saturation and color matching, with a bit of fringing, but not enough to impair the picture quality. The camera also scored an average of 1,300 lines of resolution, which is within the acceptable range for a 5MP camera (though it's only a bit higher than the 4 MP SD300's score).

The EX-S500 booted up in a flash—1.7 seconds, which is excellent for an ultracompact. Its recycle time was also very speedy, at 2.2 seconds (which handily beat the SD300 Digital Elph). There was virtually no shutter lag, and there was also no pincushion distortion, though we did see a little barrel distortion. The camera's Anti Shake DSP (Digital Signal Processor) worked very well in low light, though we didn't notice much difference when shooting in our bright-light setup.

We also like the video quality of the Exilim EX-S500, which uses MPEG-4 for good quality with smaller file sizes. In fact, when we shot 2 minutes of video footage, the Casio produced a 55MB MPEG-4 file. When we shot the same footage using the Canon PowerShot S2 IS, it produced the video as a 210MB Motion JPEG file. Even though the MPEG-4 file was compressed to barely a quarter of the Motion JPEG's file size, the video quality was comparable. We also like the Past Movie function, which records continuously but only stores 5 seconds of video in the buffer, and saves it to the card when you press the shutter button. The setting is perfect for situations like shooting baseball at-bats when you want to capture the exact moment when the bat hits the ball.

The decision to keep the SD300 as our Editors' Choice came down to small differences between the two cameras. We think the optical viewfinder, manual options, and $50 price difference give the edge to the Canon. That said, the EX-S500 is sleeker, faster, and takes equally good daylight pictures at a slightly higher resolution. If you aren't the type to use a viewfinder or manual settings, the EX-S500 is the ultracompact for you.

Compare the above products in our side-by-side comparison table, and view their benchmark test results

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Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.