Canon's Powershot - shooting with a little power.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Small size, good viewfinder, nice colors, good snapshots for family, friends and online.

Cons: Smallish buttons are difficult for thick fingers, grainy in the dark, weak flash.

The Bottom Line: 
This camera makes snapshots for family and friends easy and relatively stress-free.

Author's Review
Before I spend a lot of time talking about aperture, ISO, F-stop settings and glamour portraiture, I have to tell you this: I'm rating this camera based on whether it does what it - by its style, appearance, and price - leads a reasonable person to believe it ought to do. And I think it does.

I've read opinions and reviews that rate cameras based on tons of technological criteria, and grade them down because the prints they produce can't be hung in the Guggenheim next to Ansel Adams or whoever they're displaying over there at the moment.

I'm of the opinion that if you want a Guggenheim portrait, you don't go buy a purplish camera the size of a credit card with buttons the size of small peas and a flash that fades after six feet or so.

But if you're not going to pore over blow-up prints with a magnifier looking for defects and artifacts, and if you are happy with snapshots that you can post on Facebook or print reasonably-sized pictures to show your friends, the Canon PowerShot SD780 IS / IXUS 100 IS is fine - just fine.

In several respects it reminds me of those little 110 film Instamatics of long ago. First, it's, well, little.  And if the room's too dark, the ISO adjusts up so high that there's a lot of grain or "noise" - just like the high ISO of those tiny 110 negatives. If your subject is too far away (more than 6 - 8 feet) in a darkish room, the tiny flash won't be much help, and the picture will still be grainy.

And the misleading higher megapixel count will disappoint those who are looking for clean, dramatically clear blowups. Megapixels are a marketing red herring in any case. A digital camera's sensor is set up kind of like the cones and rods on your retina - thousands (okay, millions, actually) of little pinprick-sized points packed onto a surface that, combined together, gather the info that's sent to the camera's processor. The processor turns it into a picture that's displayed on the screen and saved into memory. Well, guess what - tiny cameras (like this Canon) have tiny sensors, and even tinier, lower quality "cones and rods" than some larger cameras with less megapixels - but larger sensors with better-quality cones and rods (bear with the metaphor, okay?). The Canon has 12.1 megapixels. My Sony DSC, for instance, has only 5.2 megapixels, but a larger, better quality sensor, so the pictures look just as good if not better (definition-wise) than this Canon.

But does that make the Canon a bad camera? Shoot, no. You look at it, you think "snapshots." Just like Canon wanted you to, I betcha. I bought this camera for my wife about a year ago, and we've taken more than 1,000 pictures with it since then. I've used the mini-HDMI input to connect to our hi-def flat screen, and guess what. The pictures taken in normal light look pretty darn good, even on a 1080p hi-def screen.

And the snapshots on a computer screen, especially those reduced in size for Facebook or to send by e-mail, look great. The Canon is simple to operate, though its buttons are a bit small for a thick-fingered old man (yours truly) to manipulate. My wife, who manipulates tiny pieces of delicate equipment around premature babies for a living, shines in the miniature button department. There is an "Auto" mode that determines shutter speed, aperture, ISO and whether to fire its tiny little weak flash. That means that the operator doesn't have to do it, and you guessed it - the particular operator I'm married to doesn't want to mess with that stuff.

The viewfinder is a good size (2.5") and bright enough to work even on fairly bright days. But if it's not bright enough, use the small-eyehole viewfinder, for cryin' out loud, though you won't be able to use the face-detection technology you see on the big viewfinder. There's a 3X optical zoom, and digital zoom is available, though I don't like to use it because the image becomes pixilated pretty quickly. It has Image Stabilization technology, and you can flip the control over to a kind of manual format, which I use mainly to force the flash in daylight settings where my subjects are in shadow. Then I flip it back to Auto where all the decisions are made for you.

But that's just fine with my wife - she loves the thing. She loves its half-a-deck-of-cards size, and even its purplish-pink-mauve (okay, sue me, take a color chip to Lowes and see if they do better) color. It fits easily in her purse, with no camera clunkiness. Do you realize how valuable that is to many women? And not a few men for that matter, though I carry it in my manly front pocket. The lithium battery stays charged for a couple hundred pictures easily, and it will even do quasi-HD video (720p) at 30 fps.

We got a 16GB micro-SD chip that holds half a gazillion photos (or, okay, around 4,900 plus) and/or a couple hours video. It'll hold a 32GB chip if you want it to, but are you really gonna wait until there's 9,500 pics on the thing before you drain it onto your hard drive? I hope not. The 16GB chip works just fine for us, and we've never come close to filling it, even after our recent Alaska trip, where it seemed de rigueur to take 175 pictures of the spot in the water where the whale just breached. You don't sweat tons of exposures with a chip like that.

So here's the deal. You want to publish your glamour shots in Elle? Get a 24 megapixel Hassie (and hire a good photo retoucher). But if you want snapshots to share with family, friends and online, then for under $200.00 - the price has gone down since we bought it - this isn't a bad choice.