Camera Test: Canon PowerShot SX100 IS

	Photo by Jack Howard
	This image gives a feel for just how much reach you've got with the Canon PowerShot SX100 IS. Click photo for more field-test images.

In the Field

This little composite-bodied camera feels good in the hand. The AA-battery-holding grip bulge is helpful, although its smooth surface may be problematic in hot and humid conditions for some shooters. Most of the buttons and dials have a good feel, the only exception being the spinning/up/down/left/right button-dial, which feels under-damped and cheap to the touch. The manual pop-up flash won't accidentally flip open, and closes with just a light touch.

The 2.5-inch LCD doesn't pack as many dots as we'd like (just 172,000), and while playback images look good, previews can be very noisy, particularly in anything less than decent sunlight. We also noticed a very visible flicker to the LCD in preview mode under fluorescent lighting conditions. The low resolution LCD is one of those "cut corners" that bother us about the SX100 IS.

During playback, however, particularly in focus-confirm playback, the LCD shortcomings aren't as evident, and the ability to quickly zoom in (up to 10x) on the active focus points is a very nice touch that the SX100 IS shares with its bigger stablemate, the PowerShot G9.

Autofocus is very fast in bright light, and is still pretty fast indoors, even with the AF assist beam turned off. Autofocus is also quick in macro mode. Macro can focus down to 1 centimeter, by the way, so close that a U.S. quarter more than fills the frame!

Image stabilization works well to keep the shakes away. In our field tests, we were able to get sharp shots at full 360mm zoom as slow as 1/30 second. And in our test video clip, it did an excellent job of keeping the jitters to a minimum. No matter how stable a shooter you are, you're going to shake a little bit during video capture, but the SX100 IS controlled it very well.

Manual exposure mode skips the live histogram. The LCD does gain up and down as you toggle the shutter and aperture, and once you tap the shutter button halfway, it alerts you to under- or over-exposure. This feature works OK, but a real-time metered manual function -- whether it be a histogram or a +/- EV slider -- would be better, considering that LCDs, even ones that automatically gain up and down based on the ambient lighting, are less precise than a live histogram or live meter.

There are just a handful of Scene modes to choose from including Beach, Fireworks, Snow, Foliage, Indoors, Night Scene and Aquarium. Other Shooting modes on the exposure dial include Auto, Program, Tv, Av, Manual, Movie, Kids & Pets, Night Snap, Landscape, Portrait, and Panoramic Assist. There's also Canon's "My colors" options, for vivid, neutral, and monochrome images in P, Tv, Av, and Manual modes.

Canon doesn't merge the panoramic shots in-camera, but simply adjusts the filenames to make it easier to do a high-quality, high-resolution panoramic stitch in the bundled Photostitch software. There's less instant gratification, but when it's done like this, you get much higher-quality final panoramic photos. (Be sure to crop loosely for pano-stitching, because you'll lose some of the top and bottom edge during the processing.)

All in all, the Canon PowerShot SX100 IS feels good in the hand, the field shooting experience is quite enjoyable, and the feature set can make for some great images, provided you stick to the low ISOs.

The Bottom Line

The Canon PowerShot SX100 IS is a cute camera with some powerful functionality hidden beneath an easy-to-use interface. Despite the composite body, it feels good and solid in the hand and it produces very nice images at ISOs 80 and 100. The 10x optically stabilized 36-360mm zoom give a great reach from normal to supertelephoto, and the IS system works to keep the camera steady in both still and video shooting modes. Unfortunately, the low-resolution LCD can be very noisy during capture and medium and high ISO image quality is lacking. The 10x stabilized pocket superzoom category is gaining in popularity, and we're happy to see this. Canon's first jump into this arena brings some interesting features and functions (and lack thereof) into this new category. However, the low-resolution LCD and mid and high ISO image quality are disappointments.

Competitive Set:

A couple of other optically stabilized 10x pocket rockets at that $299 street price:

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 -- Panasonic's second generation pocket superzoom packs 7.2 megapixels and a true 28mm wide-angle setting on its 28-280mm f/3.3-4.9 Leica Vario-Elmarit lens.

Sony Cybershot DSC-H3 -- Sony's entry into this camera class boasts a 10x Zeiss lens (38-380mm f/3.5-4.4) and packs 8.1 megapixels.