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Looking at Canon's new 8.0 megapixel 10x (36-360mm f/2.8-4.3 35mm equivalent) optically stabilized zoom PowerShot SX100 IS (street: $299), one can't help but recall the old Sure Shot Owl 35mm camera. Sure, the Owl was a fixed focal length film camera, but look at the silhouette. There's certainly a powerful family resemblance in function and focus, even if the guts are now digital, the lens zooms, and that big owl-eye inspired viewfinder has been replaced by a biggish 2.5-inch, wide viewing angle, 172,000-dot LCD.
Like the Sure Shot Owl of yesteryear, the SX100 is first and foremost an easy to use camera with few bells and whistles. It doesn't do party tricks. There's no canned music piped into the obligatory slideshow playback mode. There are no in-camera Photoshop-style image adjustments: resize and redeye fix, sound memo, and some DPOF printer settings are the only "bells" on the playback side. You won't get lost in submenus trying to review an image; this is a camera for people who primarily use their camera for making photos.
In a lot of ways, the SX100 IS is just as Spartan on the shooting side, at least upon first glance. Under all this simplicity however, there's actually some pretty powerful processing courtesy of a Digic III chip -- Canon's current top of the line image-processing engine. It'll burst at 1.3 frames per second with fixed focus, or .8 fps with continuous focus until the card is full or the batteries drain. It can record video (VGA: 640 x 480 @ 30fps) for up to one hour or 4GB at a time. (There's no optical zoom while recording. You can digitally zoom up to 4x, which will impact image quality, so you're better off just sticking to one focal length.) There's center, face, and multi-point focusing, and Evaluative, Centerweighted average, and spot metering. Throw in manual exposure mode, and you've got a lot of advanced features in this "easy" camera.
On the subject of easy, the SX100 IS features an easy-to-understand face detection mode that does a good job of finding faces both during capture and playback, provided both eyes are visible. Optical image stabilization allows slower shutter speeds than you'd expect to keep images sharp even at long reach and in low light, with a gain of about 2 stops in our observations. This is a good thing, because it means you can oftentimes keep the SX100 IS at the lower ISOs (80-400) despite a slow shutter speed and get good results. That's important because image quality begins to suffer at ISO 400 and is downright painful at ISO 800 and 1600. (Those born before 1976 will recall, perhaps not fondly, that the same could be said for the results with ISO 400 and up consumer film before the mid-1990s, particularly with compact 35mm cameras!)
IN THE LAB
Let's start with the good news. The JPEG images produced by the Canon PowerShot SX100 IS are sharp and contrasty straight from the camera. Usually just a very light touch in post-processing is necessary to optimize the photos for display. However, there are some unfortunate image quality issues that get worse as the ISOs climb.
Noise is Moderately Low at ISOs 80 (2.0) and 100 (2.3), Moderate at ISO 200 (2.8) and 400 (2.8), and High/Unacceptable at ISO 800 (4.1) and ISO 1600 (4.3). Resolution is Excellent at ISO 80 (1825), Extremely High at ISO 800 (1590), but just High at ISO 1600 (1215). Between the Unacceptable Noise and serious drop-off in resolution, we strongly recommend against using this camera at ISO 1600, and caution using it at ISO 800. Stick with the lower ISOs and hope Image Stabilization helps gain a stop, rather than going into these high ISOs. Your photos should be the better for it.
Like many a Canon compact we've seen recently, there's Visible Barrel Distortion at 36mm (.53%), and Imperceptible Pincushion distortion at both 180mm (.04%) and 360mm (.09%). Color accuracy is Extremely High (Average Delta E: 9.0, ISO 80, Daylight Balanced).
All in all, the SX100 isn't setting the world on fire in terms of image quality. It feels like another area where some corners were cut.
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