Canon has finally updated its popular Pro70 design with a successor, the PowerShot Pro90 IS. Like the Pro70 before it, the Pro90 uses a largish L-shaped design and sports an LCD that flips out and swivels to allow a variety of shooting configurations. But Canon has added numerous welcome features to this camera, including a 10x (up from 2.5x with the Pro70) optically stabilized zoom and a top resolution of 2.6 megapixels, up from the Pro70’s 1.5 megapixels, which should prove ample for the vast majority of uses. The biggest drawback of this camera for most would-be buyers will be the $1,500 bite it takes out of your bank account.
Inside and Out
Though maintaining the basic form factor of the Pro70, the Pro90 is more streamlined and noticeably curvier than its predecessor. Canon has also improved the flip-out LCD: As one would expect after two years, its image quality is vastly superior to that of the Pro70. The camera’s body is all-plastic, but it weighs in at a hefty 1.5 pounds (without the battery) and feels very sturdy.
A dial on the top of the camera provides access to its 12 shooting modes. This dial is surrounded by a simple ring for switching between shooting, playback, and image transfer modes. On the camera’s side are buttons for white balance and flash modes, and the back of the camera holds five buttons that control flash mode, metering mode, macro mode, exposure lock, burst mode, and manual focus.
A pop-up internal flash sits on top of the long lens barrel, just in front of the flash hot shoe (the Pro70 lacked an internal flash, and required the purchase of a Canon Speedlite for flash photography). The flash is automatically deployed by the camera when needed, which can be somewhat startling when you’re looking through the viewfinder.
The right side of the camera houses the media bay, which can accept both Type I and Type II CompactFlash cards. In addition to normal flash memory cards, the Pro90 is compatible with all IBM MicroDrives including the 1GB offerings. A compartment on the bottom of the camera holds its proprietary Lithium-Ion battery.
In general, we were very pleased with the Pro90’s design. Sturdy and comfortable to shoot with, the camera provides a secure grip and stable heft. As we’ll discuss later, our only design complaint is the zoom control, a ring-mounted control located on the front of the lens.
Inside, the Pro90 IS has more in common with the Canon PowerShot G1 than the Pro70: Canon based the camera on the G1’s 3-megapixel CCD but had to mask the CCD down to 2.6 megapixels because of the lens used with this model. Having more resolution always seems preferable, but this camera is still capable of delivering a 1,856-by-1,392-pixel image, which isn’t a great deal smaller than the images you’d get with a true 3-megapixel camera. In general, we did not find that the camera’s image quality suffered from the lower resolution.
In addition to its full-resolution mode, the Pro90 also offers VGA and XGA resolutions, each with three levels of JPEG compression. The Pro90 also features Canon’s excellent Raw mode, which provides uncompressed shooting capability. With a maximum file size of about 2.1 megabytes, Raw mode is a great alternative to uncompressed TIFF files, though we saw little difference in quality between Raw and the camera’s Super Fine JPEG compression.
Shooting with the Pro90
Like its competitor, the Olympus C2100 Ultra Zoom (which also uses a 10x zoom lens), the Pro90 is a lot of fun to shoot with. With a 35mm equivalency of 37 to 370mm, the big zoom lens is obviously much more flexible than the 3x zooms found on most cameras. And the Pro90’s optical stabilization means you can easily shoot full telephoto shots without a tripod. Canon’s stabilization seemed better than Olympus’ during our testing, managing to smooth out many more subtle jitters and vibrations.
The Pro90 provides the same shooting modes as the G1: full automatic, program, shutter priority, aperture priority, and full manual, plus seven special shooting modes ranging from landscape to night shooting. Modes are selected by simply choosing them on the camera’s mode dial.
Just as with the G1, most of your shooting options can be accessed from a single button on the back of the camera. Repeatedly pressing the button cycles though four different controls: exposure compensation, white balance, bracketing, and flash exposure compensation. Though it’s nice having these controls on the camera rather than buried in a menu, we would prefer to have a separate exposure compensation control that we could use while looking through the viewfinder. As is, you’ll most likely have to interrupt your framing to change exposure compensation.
We would also like to see a control for cycling through equivalent exposure settings. Many of Canon’s less expensive competitors (such as the Nikon Coolpix 990) have this function, as does Canon’s own EOS D30.
Though most of the camera’s shooting controls are on the outside of the camera, when you do need to access the camera’s menu system, you’ll find it well-organized, quick to respond, and easy to navigate.
Because creating an optical, through-the-lens viewfinder is an expensive operation, Canon has included an electronic viewfinder (just like you’d find in a camcorder, or on Olympus’ C2100) for the Pro90. On the upside, an electronic viewfinder delivers much better coverage than the typical inexpensive optical viewfinder (100%, in this case), is usable in bright daylight, and provides a display of all salient camera settings and info.
On the downside, though the Pro90’s electronic viewfinder is very good, it’s still no match for the clarity and quality of a good optical viewfinder, and this camera lacks an optical viewfinder of any sort. Though the Pro90 provides a manual focus control, it is hardly usable with the camera’s electronic viewfinder, and it may take you a while to get used to the viewfinder’s general lack of detail and resolution even in automatic mode.
You can, of course, also use the swivelling LCD screen as a viewfinder, and the Pro90’s LCD is of the same high quality as the G1’s. Once you’ve seen Canon’s cool, swivelling design, you’ll probably wonder why more vendors don’t follow suit.
Though the camera is comfortable to hold and shoot, we never did get used to the front-mounted zoom ring. A powered zoom — just like those found on most digital cameras — it is controlled by simply turning it in one direction or the other. Ideally, this is supposed to feel like the manual zoom control on an SLR lens, but in this case it doesn’t. Though it is a proportional control — zooming faster or slower depending on how far you turn it — its zoom speed is always too slow. Many camera makers have started placing zoom controls near the shutter-release, and we’ve grown accustomed to the one-handed shooting this layout affords. The old-fashioned zoom ring on the lens makes one-handed shooting impossible, though it would be quite feasible thanks to the camera’s excellent image stabilization. We much prefer a control mounted near the shutter-release button.
The camera has a few other shooting oddities. As with the G1, you can’t use an aperture larger than f4 when shooting at 1/1000th of a second, and the camera offers a rather limited range of autofocus and metering options. In addition, the camera provides no Bulb mode: The longest exposure you can manage with the Pro90 is 8 seconds.
The autofocus mechanism provides only a single-spot focusing mechanism, while the only metering choices are spot or center-weight metering. A robust, full matrix metering system would be a welcome addition.
Finally, there is no macro mode to speak of, a bit of a problem on a camera that can’t focus closer than about three feet. Canon sells a macro adapter that screws on to the front of the lens, but this is obviously far less convenient than built-in macro capability.
Performance and Image Quality
The Pro90 IS boots rather slowly — it took about 5 seconds to come to life on our tests — but its recycle time (the amount of time before you can shoot another shot) is virtually nothing. The camera’s shutter is quite responsive, offering little or no discernable shutter lag
Like the G1, the Pro90 provides four ISO settings: the usual 100, 200, and 400, along with a super slow, super clear ISO 50. An auto setting will automatically select between 50 and 100. The ISO 50 mode is a great addition that more vendors should adopt: It delivers beautiful, seemingly noise-free images. Unfortunately, as with the G1, images shot with the camera’s higher speeds are almost useless, as they are hampered by extreme, very grainy noise.
Canon has also ported the G1’s optional noise-reduction scheme to the Pro90, though it is now on all the time. This noise reduction does a great job of smoothing out images, but it also serves to hamper the camera’s Drive mode, limiting you to a maximum of about 1.5 images per second for roughly 9 to 15 frames.
In general, the Pro90 delivers very good images. Its lens is clear and sharp and the lack of true 3-megapixel resolution is hardly noticeable, even in fine detail. Color reproduction is very good, though the images tend toward a very cool cast.
Click here to see the original, full-sized image.
As with the G1, the Pro90’s black point is rather gray. This prevents it from rendering dark, black shadows and, in the process, seems to reduce the camera’s contrast ratio. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it provides good preservation of detail and offers more latitude for later correction. Overall however, we were disappointed in the camera’s metering, which frequently overexposed even fairly simple situations. We were a little surprised by some of the color artefacts scattered around the image (in particular, look at the edge of the fence shadows in the sample image above). This is most likely due to the camera’s center-weight metering. Bear in mind that the overexposure is not terrible, and can be corrected with a simple exposure compensation. For a camera in this price range, however, we expect more.
Click here to see the original, full-sized image from the Pro90, and here for the full-sized C-2100 image.
Accessories
Canon sells a number of Pro90 accessories including a wide angle adapter that extends the lens’ wide angle to 29mm (in 35mm equivalencies), a macro extension, and a lens hood. As with most lens extensions, these adapters do the job, though they lack the quality of real wide-angle or macro lenses.
We were very impressed with the performance of the Pro90’s battery, and were easily able to pull 200 to 250 shots from a charge. Granted we tend to prefer the electronic TTL viewfinder to the LCD screen, so our results might have been a little high. The battery recharges quickly, taking only a couple of hours for a complete recharge.
This or That
The Pro90 is a good camera. With better metering and a slight interface change here and there it would be a very good camera. If you have the money and need a lot of telephoto power, the Pro90 is a quality alternative to high-priced digital SLRs. If you’re in the market for a camera with a big lens, however, you may be better off with the Olympus C2100, which offers slightly better exposure and can now be had for around $700. The C2100 has slightly lower resolution and doesn’t offer the slow ISO speed, flip-out screen, and better image stabilization of the Pro90, but it does provide a built-in macro feature, slightly faster performance, and one-handed shooting.
Editor’s note: For more image comparisons between the Pro90 and the Olympus C-2100, check out the companion Web site to Ben’s upcoming book “Complete Digital Photography.”
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on May 2, 2001
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