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Canon PowerShot S95
August 19, 2011 | 
Author If you’re looking for the best image quality you can get in a pocket-sized camera, look no further than the 10-megapixel Canon PowerShot S95 ($399.99 direct). With the largest image sensor you’ll find in a compact camera, and a brighter-than-most lens, this small shooter delivers beautiful shots in most lighting conditions, without a flash. If you’re open to spending a little more and carrying a slightly larger camera, the Sony Alpha NEX-3 ($549.99, 4.5 stars) can be found for $500 these days, and it packs a much larger D-SLR-sized image sensor that will deliver much sharper photos than the S95 can produce. But if you absolutely need something that will fit in your pocket, the S95 is the best you can get, making it our Editors’ Choice for high-end pocket cameras.
Design
Very unassuming looking, the squarish S95 is matte black (think laptop finish), and at 2.3 by 3.9 by 1.2 inches (HWD), it’s toward the top of the compact camera size spectrum. The camera’s body is loaded with scroll wheels, which makes the shooting experience feel almost D-SLR-like. One ring sits around the base of the lens where it meets the body, and another is to the right of the LCD—it makes for a nice, two-handed manual shooting experience. The rings can be assigned to control aperture and shutter speed, or they can be reprogrammed to control a number of other functions (ISO sensitivity, exposure, focus, etc.). You also have the option to shoot in fully automatic mode with face detection.
The 3-inch LCD on the back of the camera is stellar. The average 3-inch camera display is made up of 230,000 dots; the S95 doubles that to 460,000, so images on the screen are incredibly crisp and sharp. The LCD shows virtually no motion blur, and offers great contrast with dark blacks. Using it as both a viewfinder and for image playback was a pleasure. There’s a pop up flash up top.
The lens is the biggest draw here, with a focal range of 28-105mm (35mm equivalent), it offers just 3.75x optical zoom. But this lens isn’t about zoom—it’s about light. In its wide-angle position (28mm), the aperture can open all the way to f/2, so it lets in a lot of light, which is key for shooting in low light without a flash.
The bright f/2 lens is paired with an image sensor that’s very large for a compact camera. A few compact Panasonic cameras, like the Lumix DMC-FX700 ($399.95, 4 stars), have nearly-as-bright f/2.2 lenses, but the FX700′s image sensor (roughly 25mm²) is less than half the size of the S95′s.
Performance
The S95 takes an average of 2.33 seconds to boot and shoot, you’ll wait an average of 2.78 seconds between shots, and shutter lag averages just .55 seconds, so the S95 feels very fast. Those are all good speed scores for a compact camera, but they’re nowhere near a Micro Four Thirds camera like thePanasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 ($699.95, 4 stars), or the Sony NEX-3. These cameras’ shutter lag clocks in closer to 0.10 seconds, and they can shoot at 2.40 and 2.30 frames per second (respectively).
In the PC Labs we use Imatest to collect object information about image quality. In terms of sharpness, the Canon S95 delivered a center-weighted average of 1,858 lines per picture height, which is a good result. The Panasonic FX700 offers a competitive 1,817 lines, but with image noise, the S95′s larger sensor really stood out. All the way up to ISO 1600, the S95 keeps image noise under 1.5 percent (the acceptability threshold). Even pics taken at ISO 3200 weren’t horrible, though they fell short of Imatest’s mark. (The FX700 only produced useable images up to ISO 400 in our tests.) The S95 is an excellent low-light shooter, and will work in most situations without a flash. Still, though, it’s important to note that D-SLRs will produce sharper images with less noise at any ISO sensitivity.
Video recordings captured in 720p30 HD look similarly great. The files are written as .MOV, so you can upload them right into YouTube and Facebook. Canon is a bit behind its competitors in recording options, though: the Panasonic FX700 allows recording in multiple resolutions (up to 1080i) and with different codecs (like AVCHD for less compression and higher quality).
Connectivity options on the S95 are top-notch. There’s a universal mini-USB port for connecting to your computer and a standard mini-HDMI port for plugging the camera right into an HDTV for HD image and video playback. The camera writes photos and videos to SDXC and SDHC cards.
Canon’s PowerShot S95 reaches the current upper limit of image quality in pocket-sized digital cameras—that’s why it wins our Editors’ Choice for the category. This little guy packs a sweet LCD, great controls, a big image sensor, a bright lens, and it pumps out stellar-looking photos—but at $400, it’s not cheap. And keep in mind, we’re entering a digital imaging revolution. Breakthroughs in high-speed small processors enable compact interchangeable lens cameras like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 and the Sony Alpha NEX-3 use much larger image sensors, which can deliver quality and speed that’s leaps and bounds above what you’ll get with the S95.
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HP EliteBook 8460p
HP’s new EliteBook line looks much like models in the older EliteBook line, such as the EliteBook 8440w we reviewed 15 months ago. 
Yes, the external skin offers a more pleasing brushed aluminum aesthetic, but it’s still a little clunky looking. You could call it the gray flannel suit of laptop computing.
The latest EliteBook 8460p is the smallest model in the EliteBook lineup, with a 14-inch screen and a weight of about 5.5 pounds. The new model is equipped with one of the latest-generation Intel Core CPUs. Our review unit carried a 2.5GHz Core i5 2520M with a maximum turbo boost speed of 3.2GHz. HP’s configuration also included 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition, and a Radeon HD 6470M mobile GPU.
The Radeon HD 6470M is fully DirectX 11-compliant, but it’s unlikely to give you much of a performance boost in current-generation DX11 games: Its 3DMark 2011 performance score is a modest 598. T play hardcore games, you’ll have to dial down the resolution and detail settings substantially.
But the EliteBook 8460p is all about business, not play, and HP includes a robust package of software that caters to business users. HP ProtectTools, for example, gives end users and IT managers fine-grain control over security features, such as drive encryption and user login control. ProtectTools includes facial-recognition software that can work in concert with your Bluetooth-enabled phone to verify that the person logging in is really you.
HP Power Assistant is a reskinning of the Windows Power Management controls, but it isn’t deeply buried and it’s substantially more user-friendly than its predecessor. Like ProtectTools, Power Assistant supports remote management by IT system administrators, if the right HP management suite is running on the server.
The laptop’s overall performance was about average for a system of its class, with a PC WorldBench 6score of 124. Battery life is quite good, at well over 5 hours in the PCWorld Labs’ battery life test.
The keyboard’s feel is excellent, with good tactile feedback during touch-typing sessions. HP supplies both a pointing stick and a trackpad, plus two sets of buttons located to provide optimal support for each pointing device. Even though I’m a trackpad user, I liked having both sets of buttons at hand, since I could easily reach one button or another with different fingers while touch-typing. The trackpad is well-designed, too–not too sensitive and offering good support for multitouch-gesture recognition.
Another plus is the matte-finish LCD panel in place of a glossy glass display. Matte finishes sometimes yield somewhat muted color saturation, but the resulting display is much more usable because it minimizes reflections and glare. Video playback quality was excellent: DVD upscaling showed only a little edge enhancement, and we noted good detail levels on the native 1366-by-768-pixel screen. (HP also offers 1600 by 900 resolution as an option.) High-definition playback scaled down to native resolution looked very nice.
On the other hand, the overall audio quality through the built-in speakers was abysmal. Without the SRS audio enhancement software activated, maximum perceived sound levels were very low, and music had a tinny, grating quality. With SRS switched on, the speakers’ perceived loudness went up, but the sound stage seemed muddy and treble was completely lost in the midrange. I played around with different settings, but ultimately I couldn’t improve the music-listening experience. Surprisingly, movie audio quality was somewhat better, though still muddy sounding. I strongly recommend that you use headphones or external speakers if you plan on listening to a lot of music.
The EliteBook 8460p we tested shipped with a 320GB Hitachi hard drive and a DVD-recordable optical drive. The hard drive seemed a bit sluggish, and the system took several minutes to boot. HP does offer larger-capacity hard-disk drives as well as several solid-state drive options. On the optical front, you can add Blu-ray as an option.
The system comes with plenty of connections, including a USB 2.0 port on the right side that’s designed to make charging USB-connected mobile devices easier. The other USB 2.0 port on the right is a combo eSATA port. Two SuperSpeed (USB 3.0) ports are on the left side.
The left side also houses an ExpressCard slot, a four-pin FireWire connector, and the optical drive. A VGA connector, ethernet, and an actual V.92 modem connector is built into the back. A full-size DisplayPort connector is available on the right side, as are a pair of audio mini-jacks–one input and one output. Our unit shipped with 802.11n, Bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet. Cell-phone-style mobile broadband cards are available as an extra-cost add-on.
The preconfigured model of the 8460p delivered to PCWorld is priced at $1199–a touch high for a midrange business class laptop with its configuration and performance. However, it’s price is considerably lower than that of any custom-configured unit.
Overall, the HP EliteBook 8460p offers decent performance, a good display, and a great keyboard in an unassuming exterior design. The price for preconfigured models is reasonable, given some of the system management features built into the EliteBook. So if you’re looking for a fairly light business-class all-purpose laptop that gets the job done without being flashy, the 8460p deserves closer inspection. Just remember to bring your own headphones.
T-Mobile myTouch 4G
The latest addition to the T-Mobile myTouch family, the myTouch 4G($200 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile; price as of 
10/28/2010) has the most impressive specs of the myTouch phones to date, boasting a front-facing video camera, HSPA+ data speeds, and HD video recording. HSPA+ coverage isn’t everywhere, however–and it might be spotty in cities that do support it.
High-Quality Design
The first thing I noticed about the phone is its stylish, yet sturdy design. The phone, HTC-designed, feels more high-quality than the previous, plasticky myTouch models. The plastic is still there (on the face of the phone and on the hardware buttons), but the device is primarily metal and has the feel of a higher-end phone. The phone will come in four colors: white, black, plum, or red.
The phone has a vibrant 3.8-inch WVGA display, which nicely showcases the phone’s user interface. Below the display, you’ll find four hardware buttons: Home, Menu, Back, and Genius (more on that one later). Measuring 4.8-by-2.4-by-0.43 inches, the myTouch 4G is a manageable size.
Like the other myTouch phones, the myTouch 4G comes in a handy case for storing all of your phone’s accessories.
Custom Skin Over Android
Running Android 2.2, the myTouch 4G has a custom skin, which is sort of a mash-up between that of the HTC Sense and the myTouch skin we saw on the myTouch Slide.
As on the HTC Sense, you get a dynamic weather app and a socially-aware address book (which aggregates your friends’ contact information from your social networks). You also get HTC’s Friend Stream, which takes all of your friends’ status updates, links, and photos from your various social networks and displays them in a single feed.
Another unique, user-friendly feature is MyModes, which lets you customize your phone for your work life and for your personal life via widgets, homescreen apps, and wallpapers. If you want to avoid work e-mail and appointments as much as possible over the weekend, you can simply set those applications to be hidden from your homescreen when you leave your office. You can program MyModes to switch by location (using GPS), or you can switch it manually.
The Genius button, mentioned earlier, is a useful tool for smartphone newbies. Press it, and you jump to a simple voice-command menu. From there, you can use commands to make calls, compose and send texts and e-mails, search the Web, and more. It worked fairly well in my hands-on tests, taking a few seconds to figure out what you said, but producing generally accurate results. The more you use the feature, the better it gets, too: It employs Nuance’s Dragon Dictation Software, which gradually learns your voice and thereby improves response time.
Remember T-Mobile MyFaves? T-Mobile’s cheap calling plan of yore (which permitted users to make unlimited calls to five people of their choice) is back–this time, in the form of a speed-dialer application on the Slide. The app has a kind of 3D effect that you spin through to get quick access to your favorite friends’ contact information, pictures, and social networking account links. You can add up to 20 friends as your “faves.” You can easily get to the MyFaves screen by hitting the dedicated hardware button on the phone’s face.
The myTouch has a new feature called Media Room, which organizes all of your music, video, and Internet radio in one place. For media syncing, the myTouch comes with the excellent doubleTwist software onboard. Of course, you also get the dedicated YouTube app, which also supports HQ videos. HQ versions of YouTube videos are leaps and bounds better in quality than the normal, fuzzy YouTube videos.
While I like that the myTouch skin provides customizability, I don’t really like what HTC and T-Mobile have done with the 4G’s camera interface. Rather than the stock Android 2.2 interface, which gives you access to white balance and exposure controls, the myTouch’s camera does all this automatically for you. It isn’t a big deal, but it is an example of how these skins can sometimes interfere with features found in stock Android. I honestly think that the myTouch would be slightly better–and perhaps even faster–if it ran the stock Android OS.
Superb Camera/Camcorder
Despite these gripes, I was really happy with how my photos taken with the myTouch’s 5-megapixel camera turned out. On a gloomy World Series day in San Francisco, my outdoor photos looked pretty good, considering the low light. Photos taken indoors looked sharp and vibrant, but perhaps a bit overexposed (a common problem with smartphone cameras). The camera also has an LED flash, autofocus, and face detection.
The phone’s high-definition camcorder captured pretty sharp video of a busy San Francisco street (all of those people in orange and black are headed toward the Giants’ stadium for the World Series Game 2). The sound isn’t the best, however–especially if you are in a windy area, as we were.
The myTouch also has a front-facing camera, which lets you make video calls with or without a Wi-Fi connection. I only briefly tested this feature over HSPA+ as I could find only a few spots where signal strengths were strong enough to make a good video call. In a café on Van Ness St, where we achieved our fastest data speeds, video chat looked really good. And of course, video chat worked fine over Wi-Fi.
You have two options for video chat: Qik or Yahoo Messenger. Both integrate nicely into your address book, too, alerting you which of your contacts have video chatting capabilities. Since I’ve used Qik a lot with other devices, I opted to use Yahoo Messenger’s video chatting app. It was really easy to set up with my existing Yahoo account, and it was simple to make calls directly from my list of contacts.
We are going to be testing this feature in more depth over HSPA+, so stay tuned for a follow-up article; meanwhile, see below.
HSPA+: How Fast Is It?
The myTouch 4G runs on T-Mobile’s 3G HSPA+ network, but the company defends the MyTouch 4G name by pointing out that the connection speeds seen on the phone are on a par with LTE and WiMAX.
And from what we’ve seen, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network really is kicking out speeds comparable with existing 4G networks–in certain places. Sitting at in a café in San Francisco, where HSPA+ service is available (and strong), a T-Mobile rep achieved download speeds of 3.5 megabits per second and upload speeds of 0.66 mbps per second in one test, then 4.5 mbps down and 1.31 mbps up in a second test. The rep said he’d seen download speeds of 6 mbps earlier in the day.
Unfortunately, over at our offices on the other side of town, we didn’t achieve such high speeds. An average of three tests yielded download speeds of 28 kilobits per second (or 0.03 mbps) and an average upload speed of 86 kbps (or 0.08 mbps) over the regular 3G network. At least in San Francisco, it really depends on where you are in the city to get the high HSPA+ speeds.
Unlike Sprint, which charges $10/month for 4G, whether you have coverage or not, T-Mobile does not charge an extra fee for HSPA+.
Performance
Call quality was pretty good, but I did hear some strange static in the background of a few of my calls. Callers on the other end of the line were quite pleased with how my voice sounded. I made my test calls on a blustery, noisy World Series day (with multiple helicopters flying overhead), but my contacts said that they could barely hear the background noise.
Like a few of the older BlackBerry models on T-Mobile, you can make calls over Wi-Fi with the myTouch 4G. In fact, the myTouch 4G is the first phone on T-Mobile to have this option. My calls over Wi-Fi worked just fine, but be aware that if you leave that Wi-Fi hotspot, your call will be disconnected.
The myTouch 4G is powered by the second-generation Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 768MB of RAM. The phone is incredibly snappy, both in the browser (over Wi-Fi especially) and throughout the software. Native video playback was also quite impressive.
Conclusion
T-Mobile and HTC definitely have a real winner here with the myTouch 4G. The powerful processing speeds paired with HSPA+ data speeds are hard to beat when it comes to watching videos and browsing the Web. The camera is also quite good (though the camcorder’s microphones aren’t the best). If you don’t have HSPA+ available in your city, however, you might want to hold off on buying a myTouch 4G until coverage is expanded. You won’t be able to make video calls over the network unless you have HSPA+ connectivity (you can still make them over Wi-Fi, though). Even in a city where it is supported (like San Francisco), HSPA+ still has a ways to go for area coverage.