Movie mode
Canon sells the S5 IS as more than a big zoom stills camera - it's a fully-fledged digital movie camera too; the movie mode is so important it gets a separate movie start/stop button, which can be used to grab clips whatever mode you're shooting in. Movies are recorded in Motion JPEG (AVI) format with stereo (WAV) sound - still no MPEG4 unfortunately. That said, movie quality is superb, smooth and artefact free (and pretty stable thanks to the IS), and the range of controls offered excellent.
The downside of such high quality is that the AVI files are large - at the best quality setting (640x480 / 30fps) you're burning around 2MB every second, so if you intend to shoot a lot of movies you're going to need to invest in some big, fast SD cards. New for the S5 IS is an 'LP' mode that produces smaller files (though there is a visible reduction in quality).There is a separate movie mode, but the only difference is that you can change some settings before shooting.
The only other significant change over the S3 IS is that the 1GB maximum file size has been increased to 4GB, meaning you can shoot a single clip of around 35 minutes or so at the best quality setting (the S5 IS also adds SDHC compatibility so you can splash out on the huge cards you'll need to use the movie mode).
Movie options include size (640 x 480 or 320 x 240 pixels), frame rate (30 or 15 fps), and the 60 fps (320 x 240 pixel) option introduced with the S3 IS. You can also use many of the parameters available in stills mode, including (if you really want to), the 'special effects' in the MyColors menu.
You can zoom during filming (thanks to the near-silent zoom and focus mechanism). You can also shoot a still in the middle of shooting a movie clip (by pressing the main shutter release), though this does, inevitably, cause the movie to pause briefly.
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