Well, I’ve had the Canon S1 for a few weeks now, but because of my nosebleed situation, I have not had all that many opportunities to test it. But soon after I got here in mid-December, I did have one chance to test it against the old Canon PowerShot model’s zoom lens. The PowerShot S30 I’ve got has the typical 3x zoom for a digital camera, and that is identical to the zoom on my father’s S45. So when we went to the 49ers-Washington game a few weeks back, we took side-by-side photos for comparison.

The grid of four images below represent the extremes of the zoom lenses for both cameras. Due to size restrictions, I couldn’t post the full-sized comparison here, but if you click the image, it will take you to the 800×600 original image in a new window.

Of the four images in this grid, the two on the left are taken with the S45, and the two on the right are taken with the S1-IS. The top two images are fully zoomed out, and the bottom two are fully zoomed in. All the images are cropped, and in the full-sized image, are not reduced or enlarged in any way, so what you see is the original image, pixel for pixel. Since the images are cropped, that in itself acts like a zoom, but since I don’t want to burden you with four megabyte-sized images each many times larger than your display, this will have to do.

The two key images are the ones at the bottom, which show the difference you get between the 3x zoom and the 10x zoom. These images were shot from the upper deck at Candlestick Park during the pre-game activities. I figure that the 25-yard-line, where the kicker was practicing, was about 60 yards distant from the lens. So looking at the lower-right image of the ball at the kicker’s feet, that’s a pretty good zoom image. I mean, I’m getting blades of grass and you can almost read the writing on the football.

So until they come up with a 20x zoom in a mid-range digital camera, I’m going to consider this as being pretty cool.