This is the kind of camera that makes everyone smile.
It's satisfying to use, like an old school flip phone.
But what about this $30 camera from 2004 makes it special?
And does the CCD sensor really produce filmlike images,
starting with the appearance of this camera?
It is quite a peculiar thing. At first glance.
The Canon PowerShot S 60 is very, very narrow.
Never call the bat narrow. It's very, very wide and very, very
short. Sorry?
It's very, very wide and very, very short.
Far away from the Canon PowerShot G line of more high end cameras and
other Canon compacts like the Ixis line, this S 60 is a much different
design. When I first held this camera, I
thought because of the width and kind of empty space on the back of
the camera, it would be uncomfortable to use, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The layout of the camera, once you actually start using it makes a lot
of sense, especially the lens cover that actually activates the camera like an old
school flip phone. Amazing.
Then on the back of the camera, we have our LCD screen that is
all the way to the left, leaving quite a lot of space over the
right for a kind of flat but useful thumb grip.
And this actually means that the excess of the body is great to grip
with and also kind of fidget with while you're walking along on the street
ready to shoot. The layout of the back of the
camera would feel quite normal when put aside other compact cameras.
But because of the small LCD screen and then the much wider length of
the body itself, it does kind of feel like we've got a lot of
big buttons versus kind of a smart layout of buttons.
But alongside our screen, we have our DPAD, our Play button, the print button
that we for some reason need display menu, and then also our zoom rocker
that is actually very useful, just beside the mode dial and in front of
the shutter button. But you may also notice we do
not have any physical dials to be able to change our settings with.
All of this is actually done using the DPAD.
So the actual directional arrows on the back of the camera, left and right
control your shutter speed, and manual mode, and up and down control your
Fstop. We do, however, have dedicated buttons for
things like metering and, oddly, a button just for printing your images so you
can plug in and print straight away directly from your camera.
2004 was a weird time, I think. Quick reminder do not forget about Lumix
GX one giveaway. I'm going to be announcing the rules
of how to win this camera for free in my new video on June
22. So subscribe to the channel so you
don't miss out on the rules on how to win a free camera setup.
I have not mentioned where the ISO lives and that actually lives within the
function menu. And the function menu is the classic
Canon function menu that you'll recognise from all modern Canon cameras within the
function menu. On this camera, we do have things
like white balance, like drive modes. We also have ISO selection, our creative
picture styles, bracketing, flash output and then JPEG compression and raw
selection. Because the PowerShot line is aimed at
the kind of prosumer enthusiast photographer, much like the G Nine, which
I think is a overall better equipped older CCD camera, this S 60 still
has a lot of those great features. So we still have loads of scene
modes. We have video mode, we have custom
mode. But it's important to remember that when
this camera came out, it cost $500, which today accounting for inflation is
$805.33, which is really quite a lot. However, this S 60 that I bought
on ebay secondhand cost me 25 pounds, including postage, which is about $30.
So this 28 millimetre lens means that our street photography can be up close
and personal in a busy street. Well, I kind of wish that was
the case. The autofocus that we have here is
actually quite slow. Sometimes it's quite snappy, but in a
lot of situations, waiting for the green confirmation of your autofocus point can
take a second or two. So sometimes I fire when it's actually
still yellow and hasn't quite decided. Luckily, you can fire before it confirms,
but if you are waiting for it to confirm, sometimes you may miss
whatever's about to happen. But despite the autofocus problems, I've
still managed to get quite a few shots that I like.
And I think a lot of that is luckily down to the sensor.
The sensor we have inside the PowerShot S 60 is a five megapixel CCD
sensor. Specifically, it's actually a 5.4
megapixel. The colour science for this sensor is,
of course, Canon colour. There's always the debate around how much
influence do CCD sensors have on the image and how much is it just
in manufacturers colour profiles that they've baked into the sensor and their
software. But I think between this and the
G Nine that are both Canon colour science CCD sensors, there is a consistent
theme here. Sadly, a let down here on the
back of the camera in terms of displaying images is that the LCD, on
top of being quite small, is also fairly inaccurate.
The JPEGs you open on your computer will look a little bit different, a
little bit less warm and a little bit less saturated than you will see
on the back of the camera. While we're on the topic of importing
your images, this also uses a Compact flash card compared to an SD card,
which is not the end of the world.
But if you do not already have a Compact flash card reader, you will
need to pick one up. If you plan to use cameras from
about this age, the colours from the JPEGs on this camera, for me, feel
quite satisfying immediately when you view them in camera, and almost as satisfying
when you get them onto your computer. My main issue here that I hinted
on earlier is the LCD screen on the back of the camera.
It's small in low light, like this room here, it's quite reliable, but
sadly, in bright daylight situations, it is very unreliable.
The max brightness of the screen does not compete with daylight at all, which
is to be expected of an LCD from 19 years ago.
But it is a bit of a letdown when you're trying to manual
control on a bright, sunny day. Inside, very confident in terms of getting
a good exposure, but outside not really embarrassingly.
Until this week, I was convinced that for some reason my camera would not
select Raw shooting from the function menu.
The Raw shooting mode lives underneath the function menu alongside the compression
settings for the JPEG modes. And when you select any of the
JPEG modes, you simply hover over them and you press the Set button and
then that compression is set. But when you go onto the Raw
mode, you could press Raw and nothing would happen.
And then you would power off the camera, come back and it was back
to JPEG again. However, it turns out, luckily, thanks to
Ototoro from my Discord server, the Megapixkills Discord server, they
suggested that actually select Raw and then just sort of exit the function
menu by pressing function menu again, and then that actually confirmed selecting the
Raw mode. And then even when I turn it
off and turn it back on again, it is there.
So I've only been shooting Raw with this camera for the last couple of
days. The majority of the images you're seeing
in this video are JPEGs and then there's a few Raws.
So, Raws aside, what are the JPEGs like directly out of this camera?
Well, they have a 5.4 megapixel resolution, which pixel by pixel gives us
a 25 92 by a 1944 resolution. And looking at this resolution, you can
see that it surpasses HD video, but it falls short of 4K.
But that's quite a respectable amount of resolution for anyone that is just posting
on social media to be displayed on phones.
This lower resolution should not discourage you from picking up an old
compact camera like this. Five megapixels is plenty enough with the
resolution that we have from this camera. Sharing on social media is not a
problem. And actually, when you view your images
large on a desktop as well, you realise just how big modern files are
of 2030 megapixel images. And when you see a five megapixel,
a lot of the time you think, well, as long as I don't crop,
this is perfectly fine. And for me, I rarely crop heavily.
And then, printing wise, you can still get away with quite large prints,
surprisingly. So you can print something like a
twelve x 16 inch print, which for metric is 30 by 40 centimetres.
Now, in terms of those JPEGs that you might print if you weren't shooting
raw, what can you actually do to get a nice look inside the camera?
Well, we have our creative effect, and inside our creative effect, we have
contrast that we can move either down by two or up by two.
Then we have sharpness with the same parameters and then saturation with the
same parameters. However, unlike the Canon PowerShot G
Nine, we do not have the ability to actually shift our RGB channels, our
red, green and blue channels. We only have the ability for these
kind of blanket corrections. Alongside our basic creative controls like
sharpness, contrast and saturation, we also have the ability to change our
white balance. We can't change our white balance
manually, as in by a Kelvin value. We do actually have quite a handy
custom white balance set if you want to get perfect white balance.
But if you're trying to go for a specific baked in JPEG look, then
you actually can select from different white balance options like daylight,
cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent, et cetera. I have mainly been using it on
Cloudy, as you'll remember from my trash camera video, getting the Fuji look in
the Canon G Nine. To create that superior extra 400 look,
I chose the cloudy white balance option. And actually, I found that's been quite
a pleasing look for me straight out of camera when shooting JPEGs on old
CCD sensors. So the big question about these older
digital cameras and the reason why they've kind of become popular again in the
last year or so is are these CCD sensor digital cameras from the mid
2000s actually producing film like images? I think when you shoot with a
CCD camera like this, there is this kind of retro throwback to the shooting
experience, to the images you get out of the camera, to kind of like
the technical limitations that all add towards feeling a bit more like shooting
analogue film. The whole slide to activate the camera
for me, as well as feeling like a flip phone, feels like my compact
film camera from Olympus that activates by sliding open the lens cover as well.
So I think if you're used to shooting an old compact film camera like
this, like a full auto film camera, then you're going to have a great
time with an old CCD camera like this as well.
But I don't know about you, I'm not really satisfied with that answer.
I think there is a debate to be had here between CCD sensors, modern
CMOS sensors and 35 millimetre film like this Lamography 800 colour film.
So in next week's video, we're going to be doing exactly that.
We're going to be directly comparing images from this G Nine, from this
S 60 with Lamography 800 colour film. In that video, we'll assess the images
that come out of this S 60 out of this G Nine and we'll
be comparing them with colour film from lamography shot on my menulta.
And that'll be quite interesting to see the sort of images you can get
out of cheap, older digital cameras. And if you're interested in
interchangeable lens cheap older digital cameras, cheque out this video here on
a camera that you can get for $300 today.
Interchangeable cheap lenses that is very fun to use for street photography fee.