In this post, I'll attempt a travel review of the Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital Elph Titanium 10.0 MP pocket-sized point-and-shoot digital camera (that's a mouthful).  This will read like a list of various things since it's my thoughts while using the camera during a short trip to Maui.  This is not a comprehensive review, but rather a practical review from trying to use it on what might be a typical vacation.

Things I Like About It

 It powers on fairly fast for a point-and-shoot (P&S) camera.  It's certainly not as fast as the 30D, although people are start to think that's because it doesn't actually power off but rather goes in to a deep sleep mode so it doesn't have to boot up when the power is turned back on.

The resolution is nice at 10MP, but some early shots show that it may be a bit dirty when zoomed all the way in.

It takes video at VGA (640x480) resolution at 30fps.  We've been using DSLRs exclusively for a while, so video is a bit of a novelty on it's own.  The rating makes it almost as good as our regular DV video camera, but without the advantage of the DV format.  However, it can also take XGA (1024x768) video, although only at 15fps.

The UI is surprisingly fast and smooth.  Previewing images is very smooth when zooming in and out and going between the images.  Although, based on the few images we've looked at on a laptop, I'm not convinced that it's looking at the full-sized original.

The camera has a manual mode that has a lot of settings that can be changed.  It's odd, though, that to enable 3200 ISO you actually have to choose a non-manual shooting mode.  That said, it's great that it has 3200 available although it's not so great that it's only 1600x1200.

It has a custom timer setting that can take between 1 and 10 images separated by 0 to 30 seconds each.  This is a pretty neat feature.

I like that it comes with a normal battery charger rather than a cradle.  The charger doesn't have any cables and is nice and small (smaller than the Canon 30D battery charger). 

The flash worked surprisingly well both inside and outside.  It seemed to have a pretty good range and didn't completely wash out people that were a few feet away to maybe 10-15 feed away.  That said, it did make completely white images when taking pictures of something in our hands. 

Things I Don't Like About It

It doesn't shoot RAW images, or any other lossless format.  This leaves little to be done with post-processing.

It's battery life is rated for only 230 shots with the screen on, which comes out to about half of a 2GB SD card.  Even with the screen off it only is rated to take 600 shots.  Since it has a proprietary battery and charger, we'll have to get more of those batteries to help out.  Some of our older and now gone P&S cameras took regular AA or AAA batteries, which was nice since they can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world.

The continuous shooting mode is rather slow with the 2GB SD cards we have.  I think it's just under a frame a second. It can also only be put in to continuous mode while in manual mode.  If you switch out of manual mode and then back, it'll lose the setting for continuous mode.  I understand why, though, since it shares the continuous shooting setting with the timer settings.

When in stitch assist mode, if the screen turns off while you're trying to line up the next shot, it'll lose where you were.  Also, the manual claims these images can only be used with the software provided and that they can't be previewed.  I'm not really sure what that means yet.

Summary

The Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital Elph Titanium is a great performer that targets consumer photography while providing some fun manual settings to override the automatic settings.  It's lacking in normal manual settings, such as Av and Tv, will keep it out of the amateur photography market, though.  Shots done in fully automatic mode always come out pretty good, though.  At 10MP, the sensor helps make up for the lack of zoom range when framing images, so you can crop out a good image and still have enough pixels for it to be useful.  It's small size is unobtrusive in restaurants and at parties, while being light enough to keep in your pocket all the time. 

Posted by Shane on February 23, 2007 8:47 AM | Permalink