Great camera with minor flaws, no reason to buy anything else. Love it!

Wonderful camera for the amateur. Allows you to experiment with various settings, but if you leave it on Portrait or Auto it does just fine on its own. I have gotten some amazing shots with it - totally the camera, not the operator. Lots of various effects/special exposures/light settings, etc that you can do, but I like Portrait best & then adjust for type of light. Movies are quick & easy and sound pick-up is ok. Stitch assist is a great feature for me, and easy to set. Like most digitals, it eats batteries, and gives little warning that you are getting close to the end. Always carry spares. But since it takes AA, you can purchase them easily if caught empty-handed. The myriad number of features at first is daunting, but I found that it worked just fine as a simple point-and-shoot, and took my time to learn the rest. After 4 years there are still things to learn - but it works so well in the basic modes that there's little need to experiment.

Ok, it's a little heavy/bulky if you are looking for a pocket camera, and the lens cap is notorious for coming off with little to no encouragement. It needs a special adaptor (1-1/2 inches deep) to put any other lens or filter on it, but the average user really doesn't need them anyway. I have taken hundreds of pictures with it, and have to admit I've not always been overly careful with it. It held up like a real trooper until the zoom control got "sticky" 2 weeks before we left on vacation. Repairs were going to take too long (we live in a rural area & shipping time was a major factor), so I bought an exact replacement rather than have to learn a new camera. I like having an optical viewfinder as the LED screen is difficult to see in bright sunlight, esp when my photosensitive glasses turn dark! The camera sometimes has trouble staying "fixed" on an image in the digital zoom phase, but I've also gotten some wonderful shots.

yes, it has some quirks, but it's also the best camera I've ever owned.

S5is has its shortcomings, but it serves well with CHDK firmware added.

Bought a used S5is on ebay back in January 2012 for $120+USD. I'm still using the S5is having developed a love/hate relationship with it.
What I love about the S5is:
One major improvement is the addition of a hotshoe mount. when shooting in dark areas with bulgy adapters a hotshoe flash is a must have. without the hotshoe there would be darkness in the mid-bottom of my photos just using the onboard flash.
SDHC compatibility up to 32gb. 8-16x the capacity of the prior S3is restricted to standard SD only commonly 2gb max.(knows that 4gb exists,but are rare)
the design flaw of the S5 is that the SDcard slot is in the battery compartment. having 16-32gb cards(which are getting cheaper since SDHC is getting superceded by SDXC 64gb+) will remedy this since it'll take a long time depending on the set resolution to fill storage space unless using video mode.
Canon Hack Development Kit firmware is available for the S5is. With this added S5is effectively turns into a 12x zoom-capable version of the G-Series Canon cameras. provides RAW picture format(crw,cr2,dng, etc)intervalometer in script form since there is none.
1/2.5 CCD is pretty capable of doing night-time long-exposures with some sense of clarity. caught a man-made satellite in orbit that clearly can be seen, but not finely detailed because of distance. there are far less pixels stuck when doing such long exposures compared to the Canon A610 with its 1/1.8 CCD which is bigger.(warning: stuck pixels may become permanant on the S5is when doing Long Exposures. there's no sensor cleaner for a temp fix either.)
What I hate about the S5is:
Very little significant improvement over the S3is.
Hotshoe, SDHC compatibility, and 2more megapixels that's it.
ISO increased from 800 to 1600 is useless with the small 1/2.5 CCD. Why add more to the image-grain?
SDcard slot in battery compartment though remedied by using 16-32gb cards.
Easy to pop-off lens cap. doesn't protect the lens if it's easy to remove. fixed by adding adapter & other 58mm accesories.
Color fringing in some photos, brought over from the faults of the S3is. If I wasn't into photo editing this would be a major annoyance.
Lack of date/time stamp especially in postcard mode.
sucks for those are are into timelapse video photography that wants to show the exact day/time the pictures in sequence where taken.
Bottom-line:
though outdated in 2012 specs the Canon S5is is still worth to use if your budget for a full-feature camera is well under $160 USD range which it has been going for some time.
Much better than the budget bridge cameras by GE that are double the megapixel which are similar, but way less in features. if you can pay more than $160 there are far better options like the Canon SX-series that came out with 10mp+ capable CMOS sensors with HD video option that came after though are outdated too.

Ideal camera for competent amateur

I already had used an earlier camera in this series (the Canon S2IS) for several year so was familiar and comfortable with the size, operation, and advantages. Only this Canon S5IS, several years newer, is much more refined. I have always loved the articulated screen which allows you to take pictures from high and low angles without getting your head to the same level as the camera. The screen on this Canon S5IS is not only larger but much brighter and easier to use in most lighting conditions. The 12x zoom with image stabilization works great. I didn't buy the even newer SX10 IS because it was over $100 more. I didn't think I would use the 20X zoom that much because I only rarely go all the way to 12X.
This camera is large enough to hang around your neck, which I much prefer to having a small camera on a wrist strap, but it's small enough not to be much of a bother. Most people, myself included, find the loose fitting lens cap an annoyance, but you get used to that and it's necessary to allow the lens to push it off when it opens.
The 8 MP resolution is enough that I can do considerable cropping in the computer and still make very nice prints up to standard 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper size. I really upgraded because the S2IS was only 5MP. Smaller cameras usually have slower lenses and lack the articulated screen. Larger cameras are much more bulky and used to make me choose between a camera and binoculars when outside birding; now I carry both (binoculars closer to my neck, camera a bit above my belt). Overall, I am really satisfied with this camera.

Great Camera

I bought this camera because I wanted a Canon or Nikon. My friends had an S3IS model, and they really recommended this one to me when I asked them.
I really like the camera!!! Its zoom feature is great!!! It's silent, which you need when you take a video, and also features both optical and digital zoom during video, which gives you 48x zoom (Never seen that in a point & shoot camera)!!!!!!!!!!
There is only one con - one would think that a camera like this should have at least 10 Mega pixels while this one only features 8. Still takes great pictures, though.
Altogether I love this camera, having great features for its small size.

Excellent camera

I bought the S5 IS to replace the S3 IS that I had. The reason I bought the S3 in the first place was that I was sick and tired of trying to take a picture of some (even slow) moving action, pressing the shutter button and then waiting for the camera to actually take the picture a couple seconds later (missing the subject). The S3 and S5 are awesome in this regard. You press the button and it takes the picture right away. All in all the S3 was a great camera so I fully expect the S5 to be the same. There is one minor nit with the S5, in the S3 there was a little door on the side to let you take the SD card out, on the S5 you have to open the battery door which is somewhat annoying, not sure why they made that less user friendly change! One area where the S5 is better is it will take the SDHC cards whereas the S3 will only take the regular SD cards (so you are limited to 2 GB on the S3). Another cool feature on the S5 is the hot shoe for an bigger flash. The S5 I bought had a flash included in it (Canon Speedlite) that is much more powerful than the built in one, I took a few pics of the interior of a large unlit garage and with the built in you couldn't see much, with the Speedlite you could see everything easily. I bought one of the cheapo lens cap & hot shoe protectors on EBay from China but found that the way the camera figures out if there is a flash on it is via a couple little strips of metal on it that when pressed down signal that a flash is on the camera, this makes the protector useless as the camera then always thinks it has an external flash on it so the built in one won't function, oh well, was less than a buck shipped from China so no big loss. For both cameras I purchased the Lensmate-like adaptors that protect the lens and allow filters and such (better lens cap) to be put on. You can find the cheap versions on eBay.

All in all I'm very happy with the camera!