The Canon PowerShot S110 ($449.99 direct) is the follow-up to last year's Editors' Choice Canon PowerShot S100SEE IT, a point-and-shoot that was, at the time, the best pocket camera on the market. In the time between camera releases other manufacturers have pushed the envelope with design—the Samsung EX2F and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7 have f/1.4 lenses that capture twice the light as the S110's f/2 optic, and our current Editors' Choice, the Sony DSC-RX100SEE IT, has a big 1-inch image sensor inside its tiny frame. The S110 does add one feature lacking from the S100—Wi-Fi connectivity—but it does so by eliminating GPS. Overall, the S110 is a very solid camera, but its feature set doesn't match its asking price.

Design and Features

Impressively small when you consider its imaging capabilities, the S110, available in black or white, measures just 2.3 by 3.9 by 1.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 7 ounces. The Leica D-Lux 5SEE IT, a similarly designed point-and-shoot that adds a hot shoe and accessory port, is a bit larger and heftier at 2.6 by 4.3 by 1.7 inches and 9.5 ounces. The RX100, which omits a hot shoe, is 2.4 by 4 by 1.4 inches in size, slightly larger than the S110.

The 5x zoom lens covers a 24-120mm (35mm equivalent) range. It starts at f/2 on the wide end, but its aperture narrows to f/5.9 by the time you zoom all the way in. This lags behind the 24-80mm f/1.4-2.7 lens packed into the Samsung EX2F in terms of speed, but does better it in telephoto reach. There's a programmable control ring around the lens, just like on the S100. You can choose what function it modifies from a list that includes Aperture, EV Compensation, ISO, and other common shooting settings.

There's a Mode Dial up top, next to the shutter release and zoom control. The rear of the camera houses the button that controls the functionality of the front control ring, a Record button for movies, the Macro button, and the flash control. When not in use, the pop-up flash hides away at the top of the camera, automatically rising when it's needed.

The rear LCD is 3 inches in size, the de facto standard for point-and-shoot cameras. Its resolution is a modest 460k dots, although it is bright enough to use on a sunny afternoon. This is another area where the Sony RX100 leads the pack—its 1,229k-dot LCD gains resolution by adding a layer of white pixels, which makes it even better for use outdoors. The display does support touch input, and is as responsive as a good smartphone when scrolling through images. You can flick your finger to move from photo to photo, and pinch to zoom to see more detail. I found the touch input to be less useful when shooting—you're better off using the physical controls to modify settings.

Wi-Fi and Setup
The Wi-Fi implementation isn't the best we've seen—that's found in the latest generation of Samsung cameras, including the NX1000SEE IT interchangeable lens camera. Using the Canon to push photos to social networks is harder than it should be.

Rather than simply supporting it out of the box, you'll first need to install the CameraWindow application on your Windows or Mac computer and register the camera with the Canon Image Gateway service. Only then will you be able to share photos and videos from the camera via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or email. With Samsung's Wi-Fi implementation you simply set these services up in camera, eliminating the need to connect the camera to your PC or to sign up for a special service. Samsung also offers a remote viewfinder app, which makes it possible to control the NX1000 via your smartphone.

Even though you can't control it with your phone, the S110 lets you transfer files to your iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or Android Tablet using the free Canon CameraWindow app. It works well, regardless of whether the phone and camera are on the same Wi-Fi network or if the camera is set to create its own hotspot. You can browse and transfer images—and, if you are really dedicated to geotagging, it's possible to keep the app running in your pocket and later add GPS location to your photos. It's nowhere near as slick as an in-camera GPS, and requires you to remember to turn CameraWindow's location log on prior to shooting. You can also share photos with another Canon Wi-Fi camera directly, which is a feature that seems limited in use.

The S110 promises to let you transfer photos wirelessly to your Windows 7 PC or Mac with OS X Lion or later. Setting up the Windows sharing is a frustrating experience that requires you to dive into two separate areas of control panel—the network settings and the Windows Firewall—to enable and disable sharing features. And the printed manual doesn't do you any favors in regard to setup instructions. S110 owners with Windows would be best served to follow the instructions in this document on Canon's support site—they are laid out in a linear, step-by-step manner.

While it's neat that the camera can do it, the Wi-Fi transfer is impractically slow—it took about eight minutes to transfer 20 files from the camera to my PC, and the Wi-Fi puts an excessive strain on the S110's battery. It's fine to beam an image or two from camera to computer, but you're still better off using a memory card reader to download images when possible. The least useful Wi-Fi feature, at least in my eyes, is the ability to print a photo wirelessly from the camera. I've never printed a photo without at least a bit of cropping, and more often some color correction and retouching.