Comparing Canon digital cameras

[LPZ_Stitch!]

Something that nobody has mentioned yet is that you cannot get nice shallow depth of field with a point and shoot camera. If you want to be able to do some of the more creative things as you learn more then you really need the larger sensor of a dSLR.

It's not impossible, it's just harder. There are two ways to get similar (not exact) shallow DOF from an S3.

First, if the subject is small enough, you can use the Macro mode ... there's a very shallow DOF with macro, and you can get about 19" away and still focus and zoom. This works great for blurring the background of flowers and bugs and other small things.

The other is to back off from the subject and zoom in, making sure to use the widest aperture the camera will allow at zoom (3.5, I think).

There's a couple of nice examples in the "First S3 pictures" thread. One I can clearly remember is birds at a bird feeder with a very nice bokeh (unfortunately, that thread takes a long time to load on my home machine or I'd just go link to that picture).