Back in 2003 I bought the Canon S45 and reviewed it here. After 11 years the camera was still perfectly working and took pictures good as ever. But I decided it was time to update. So after reading some S120 reviews and spotting a -50% discount on the S110 I decided to get the older one, for it was cheap and had everything I needed. Someone even said the S110 had better picture quality, something I can not confirm as I don't have the other one.
First shocker was the tiny size and weight compared to S45. It was like the S45 was cut in half and you could now comfortably keep it in your pocket. I didn't expect this. The LCD is of good quality but it's not like a retina-display, you can see the pixels if you look close enough. This doesn't bother me. It has enough brightness and then some. I keep it in level 3/5 which works fine in daylight. In darkness it's so bright that my eyes get distracted, but you could lower the level.
The LCD shows a text description for all the menu functions so the camera is really easy to learn. I did read the manual but you don't need to do that really. It has an enormous amount of functionality regarding all the different shooting modes, but for me it's easy as I only use P and M. Some of the functionality has been divided into Func Set menu, Internal menu and Play Mode menu. It's a bit confusing first where everything is but you get used to it. Func Set is what you use while shooting to control things like ISO, dynamic range, white balance, colors, bracketing, timer, brightness measurement, aspect ratio, picture quality and video resolution. Here they should have included Image Stabilization as one needs to change it often. Now it's in the Internal menu which is stupid as you don't need to access anything else from that menu while shooting.
About IS. You need to set IS OFF when having the camera on a tripod or other firm base, otherwise you risk blurry pictures. This is something the manual doesn't talk why it's so, it only says you should set it OFF. As the IS is based on accelerometers those give erroneous data once you place the camera on a firm base. Thus IS only works handheld. IS is a great function however. I can take pictures holding the camera up to 1 second, success rate would about 50% in that case. Up to 1/4 it works easily.
Picture quality is good, a little on the smooth end, but as the pictures are very large up to 4000x3000 that doesn't matter and you could always sharpen in software. Pictures do have some softening towards the left and right edge and some purple fringing (but cameras always do). ISO works really well up to 800, even 1600, but the picture does get less defined the higher you go. You can control the level of noise reduction in high ISO pictures, I keep it low. Camera has auto ISO and you can control max ISO. It has manual ISO ofcourse and you can assign that to Ring function. The ring works well and I use it to control brightness. It's not really needed but it's a plus to have the ring. Zoom control feels a bit flimsy, it's a plastic part, I'm afraid it's the first thing to break. Zoom moves fast so it's tricky to control it accurately, but that can be assigned to the ring for precise control. Video recording works, it's HD and 30 FPS with sound but I haven't used that feature.
Build quality of the camera is good but not top notch. It's a cheap consumer product afterall. Wrist band was not great, too stiff material and without a fastener, so I just replaced it with the old one from S45. USB port is definately on the wrong end of the camera, the right side. Should have been on the left side. It does have WIFI but I don't play with that. One thing I really like is the 3:2 aspect ratio, pictures looks great on wide screens and it appears more natural than 4:3. Other ratios are found too. Also I use dynamic control for overexposed areas which works great in cloudy pictures leaving the clouds visible and not burned out white. It has similar shadow control, but that I keep off as I prefer blacks being black. Also you have 200% and 400% HDR modes but the compression does not look like that much. For night pictures this camera is not ideal as the exposure is limited to 1 second in anything but ISO80. However, you can even shoot handheld with IS in ISO800 and get decent night photos when there's some background light in the scene. Pitch black like star pictures can only be done up to 15 seconds in ISO80. Overexposed night pictures can not be done with this.
I have 16GB memory in this and it fits a ridiculous 4000 pictures. Battery is not great but I was able to browse through menus for a couple of hours without sweat. It only starts eating the juice when you shoot. I suppose you could take about 100 pictures, perhaps more, with one battery depending on weather and how long you keep it on. Cold does eat the charge quickly. All in all, I really like this camera. Pictures are very nice and the price/performance is excellent. Recommended.
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UPDATE 14. June 2015 - After one year I want to add a few complaints here. Some of the functionality pi**es me off. Battery life of the S110 is bad. You can shoot about 100 pictures but no more at room temperatures. At 10'C perhaps half of that. At 0'C the camera won't let you shoot but retracts immediately, so it's impossible to use this camera during winter time. That sucks Canon! It has too aggressive low battery detection or just plain bad battery design. My old S45 let me shoot at -10'C and did not retract automatically. And there's more. Camera has aggressive lens retraction after a few minutes and if you switch over to the Play Mode to watch pictures, lens will retract after one minute and you can not change that. Unbelievable! You lose your zoom and other shooting settings. The camera is stupid - not intelligent in this way. Also in my opinion the camera has too much functionality and the menus are not very logical. I guess all new cameras have a lot of functionality but I'm not a fan of surfing endless menus that are accessed from different dials and work differently in all the different shooting modes. That just hurts my brain. Taking photographs shouldn't be science but a relatively simple and straightforward activity. Also the brightness compensation does not function if shooting time is already up to 1 second. It stops working at that 1 second point. Ridiculous functionality for low light conditions like indoors where you'd really want to adjust the brightness for studio work, because most of your shot is composed of white background or white walls, and then the exposure is automatically measured too low.
I read the IS should work even when placed on a tripod and I haven't noticed that it ever caused blurred pictures, maybe that was just for old cameras, so that's a good thing. You can leave the IS on (shoot only, to save battery). One thing I don't understand is that the Zoom lens does not hold the center point of a scene when zooming in and out. The picture and center point move sideways while zooming. I could not believe my eyes when I noticed this. Atleast my camera has strong horizontal lens mis-movement at the extremes. Vertically it hold the center perfectly however. This is not a problem for me because never is the zoom actually used while the camera is taking a picture, but it makes it a bit inconvenient to center objects and gives you a lousy feeling of a cheap camera. Well, it is a cheap camera I paid $250 for this with a 16GB memory card. For that amount of money I think it's still a very good camera despite of the shortcomings. Picture quality is really good despite being soft on the sides and sharper at the center. I don't have use for 4000x3000 sized pictures, scaling those to 2000x1500 atleast gives me excellent and sharp results. My monitor is 2K so all pictures will be resampled on the screen anyway. I've shot some product pictures with the S110 and people said the results were great (after the usual Photoshop adjustments ofcourse). Also all the nature pics I've taken look great straight out of the camera.
This camera is good for ISO800 indoor pictures with small electric lights but very low light performance is not good and you can not get overexposed night pictures which is a pity as the S45 shined on that one. Exposure is limited to 15 seconds and ISO80 only. Anything above ISO80 and the camera is limited to 1 second. You get clear pictures at night time but need to have some background light to get any results. Complete dark skies won't do and the autofocus does not function at low light conditions so you need to use manual focus. Also I noticed that 'infinite distance' was not a good setting and would get out-of-focus results always (stars, far away objects). I had to manually set it back a few steps to get sharp pictures. Infinity should be the general setting for everything 100 metres away or more, but it's something completely theoretical that is never useful. The lens goes "too far" at infinity. There's just too many of these inconveniencies so I must take one star off. For $250 it's a good point-and-shoot camera but no good for any serious work. Atleast it has 5X zoom range and 24-120mm focal length and manual shooting modes plus video, all great features. The S100 and S120 models are very similar to this. I would choose the cheapest of these.
