Your Best Friend in a Pocket

Author's Rating:

Pros: great zoom, color, clarity, durable

Cons: night shots come out blurry, slow delay between shots

The Bottom Line: 
Great travel camera, easy to use!

Author's Review
Stylish in any color, this camera is easy to use, and takes great quality photos and videos.  For the average, non-technical user (me), I think a lot of cameras these days are comparable, so I will just highlight the things that I think set this camera apart.  It's durable, although you should still have a camera case, but it has withstood being jumbled around in my purses and bags without a case with hardly a scratch.  It has the best zoom of any camera I have ever had (I used to have another Canon SD1000 and this one blows it away).  I used the SD1200 when I went to Barcelona and stood on the rooftop of La Pedrera and could zoom in and get really pretty good shot of the church Sagrada Familia which is 2 km away!  Really amazing!  I also got great shots during the Winter Olympics.  I was on the top level of the stadium watching the figure skating pairs and I could zoom right into the couples and have them fill the whole screen.  It has facial recognition, so it knows where to focus the shot when you're taking photos of people.  And when you're reviewing photos, you can tilt the camera and it will automatically re-orient the photo to portrait or landscape.  The only thing I don't like about it is that it is difficult to get good shots at night, or in low lighting levels.  They always come out blurry.  And the delay between photos is so long.  I don't know how to get this camera to take multiple shots at a time, so if you're taking action photos, it doesn't work well.  Better to use the video feature for those.  But having said that, you can take photos while you're moving in the daytime, and they will still come out clear.  This is really helpful when you're on a tour bus taking sightseeing shots.