Unfortunately, my sample movies all use panning, which it isn’t great without a tripod, however, the S10 is supplied with a dinky little bendable tripod, which does allow you to put it on a desk and film yourself (the screen rotates 180 degrees - perfect for my kids to start making youtube entries!)

Sample Movies:

All these were taken of the same thing, some garden, for about 10 seconds, with no editing. They show that the image stabilization isn’t much use when panning (it jerks), but the camera is jerky without it, so if you’re going to take sportstday shots and you want to follow the action, take your proper video camera! However, for just standing still shots, its not too bad. The files are all stored as Quicktime Movie files in H.264 - you have no choices in the format used, but H.264 seems like a pretty good HD standard to choose.

1080p, 11Mb
720p, 6Mb
720p (stabilized), 6Mb
WVGA, 6Mb
VGA, 3Mb
QVGA, <1Mb

I’d have to say that the 720p looks fine on a 50inch plasma, and would easily be good enough for the kids day out! QVGA is toilet, and with bandwidths these days, I’d post at least VGA. I’ll probably record in full HD, which means at around 1Mb a second, a 4Gb card will take about an hour of video. With 4Gb cards around £9 at the moment, this seems fine, and at a push will give me 2 hours of 720p footage.

Sample Photos:

For stills, it offers 3 modes, high (8Mb), std (5Mb) and low. This is definitely a point and press camera - the lens is too small to take really good shots, and the menu too awkward to start messing about with exposure, etc, although there is an easily accessible macro button on the front of the camera in case you come across the disco faced monkey hawk bee on your day out. All shots stored as jpg - there is no raw option, and unlike more expensive camera’s you can’t take photos whilst video’ing.

High, 4Mb
Std, 3Mb
Low, 2Mb

In the box:

Standard contents: camera, case, wrist-strap, HDMI cable, component cable, mini-USB cable, charger, cleaning cloth, CD (with some PC software and pdf manual), printed manual.
The retailer I used included a 4Gb SD card free.

Buydirect.co.uk

This is a very cheap dealer, who seem to offer “refurbished” units. This surprised me as the S10 is almost a new camera, but the first one I was sent had a dodgy microphone. I went through their online returns procedure, and sure enough the replacement was at mine within a week, so can’t complain about it. All fully boxed, and seemed exactly as new. Other dealers were charging around £130 for the S10, whereas buydirect.co.uk charged £99, including delivery and a free 4Gb SD card.

Summary

HD in HQ - no. Cheap. compact and cheerful - yes. In the garden with the boy and the dog, took some nice shots; doesn’t cope particularly well with bright sunlight, but seems to be fine in average conditions. That seems to sum it up really, pretty average, not bad, good enough! :-) It will do until I can afford the gorgeous Sony HD marvel - the £700 TG7.