Review: Canon PowerShot SD800 IS Okay

Canon PowerShot SD800

If you’re a point-and-shooter with a flair for style, the Canon PowerShot SD800 is a perfect fit for you.

It’s ultra-compact and super-stylish and it takes very good photos too. Not great photos, though. There are trade-offs if you go for this kind of ultra-compact. Its very small size naturally limits the kind of optics it can pack and this shows in some corner softness and purple fringing of some pictures you take, and moderate barrel distortion at the wide end of its 3.8x zoom lens. But only the most discerning will notice.

You can still make a go for theSD800 (aka IXUS 850) and enjoy its good quality photos. Its image stabilization (that’s the IS in its name) works very well, as does its face detection (FD) algorithm. FD detects a face or faces in the scene and tells the camera that you are taking a picture of people and appropriately focuses on the faces, not on the background.

The SD800 packs a 7.1-megapixel image sensor and the Digic III image processor. Although it has a sharp 2.5-inch LCD display, it thoughtfully retains an optical viewfinder.

Its street price is about $380.

[Via DCResource.com]

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.