Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be playing around with the Canon Powershot SD700 IS, which is the newest in the Digital Elph line up.
- It has a sleek design, which can easily slip into your pocket, and is still easy enough to handle.
- 6.0 Megapixels, sure there are cameras with bigger pixel counts, but do you need them, probably not.
- 4 time optical zoom which is standard, digital zoom is also a function you can enable in the menu, never use this.
- Optical Image Stabilizer, it will be interesting new feature for Canon Digital Elph series. But after quick preliminary test, the on screen looks good compared to the blur you would get on older point and shoot cameras.
- There are several scene modes, or dummy modes as I like to call them, which is great for people who just want to take pictures.
- A movie mode is available, maybe I can do a pseudo videocast.
- Really quick startup time, which is great, but it is kind of annoying to me that red eye reduction flash is a default. You have to turn it off manually, every time you turn on the camera.
Watch this space over the next couple of weeks to see photo results.
Biggest peeve so far is the 16 Meg card that they includes with the camera. Really, why bother, I don’t understand the logic behind including such a small card with the camera. With most cameras, you will need at least a 512 card if not larger. My siggestion is to pick up a 1 or 2 gig card when purchasing a new camera. It sounds extreme, but i’m an extreme shooter.
I have an Ixus 55 (SD450 in North America) and I have to say, the image stabilization would be a welcome addition. And yeah, mine came with a 16 megabyte card too… what the hell am I going to do with that, it stores less than 10 pictures. I made sure to pick up a 1 gig high speed SD card when I purchased the camera.
How come you get to play with all the fun toys?
I have used the digital zoom in my camera in certain situations, for example, when I took pictures of Fatman, I would use the optical zoom, but it was still a bit far so I used the digital zoom so that my readers could see him closer.
Using Digital Zoom is the same as cropping an image in photoshop, you lose resolution
Actually, Digital Zoom is more like cropping in Photoshop, and then artificially increasing it so it has the same resolution as the original picture. At least when you crop, the image quality stays the same.
What great timing!
I work part-time in a photolab and a customer came
in and printed a bunch of pictures from her memory card.
I was looking through them to make sure there were no scan lines and I was so impressed with the quality (which rarely happens with our customer base). I shoot with the 20D and when I asked her what camera & lens she used she said it was just
‘this little new digital point & shoot’.
The SD700 IS
I’m looking fwd to seeing your pictures! No doubt this little camera can pump out some pretty impressive ones.
That is great to hear regarding the prints. I am going to have to try printing something from this camera as well to see how well it does.