Perfect Little All-Purpose Camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Compact size, optical viewfinder, customizable settings, anti-shake feature, affordable, 12 mps.

Cons: Small size may be bad for large hands, ultra close-ups sometimes blurry

The Bottom Line: 
An excellent camera to keep on hand at all times, compact and takes solidly good pictures while offering advanced features for those who want them.

Author's Review
I was a little concerned about buying this camera, I'll admit. My previous camera was a Sony mega-zoom -- a digital camera that looked like an SLR, ie: substantial, with big handholds and a big optical viewfinder. But the Sony had two problems - 1) it stopped working, and 2) even before it stopped working, I tended not to have it with me when I needed a camera because of its very size. Still, I liked a camera that felt substantial, and this Canon is quite the opposite.

The Canon SD780 is tiny. It fits into the palm of my hand. Although I was concerned about whether a small sized camera would give me the real feeling of photography, it turns out I had nothing to worry about. This camera takes great pictures, and its miniscule size ensures that you'll always have it with you. I keep it in my pocketbook at all times -- it weighs next to nothing -- and I always have it available when I want to snap a picture.

But it turns out that it's far better than just a point and shoot. The controls are fairly straightforward, and allow a good deal of flexibility in terms of customizing your shot. For example, I like very vivid colors, and the Canon allows me to set all the colors (or one specific color, such as blue, for the sky) to vivid setting. This produces beautiful color saturated pictures that practically jump off the screen.

The image stabilization feature makes sure that the camera gets a clean shot, even if your hands are shaking a bit or if you are on an unstable surface, like the deck of a boat.

The zoom is quite good, I got a close up of a dragonfly sitting on a flower, and you could see the expression on the dragonflys face. Amazing.

It has more than enough megapizels (12) so that you can blow up any picture you take to an 8 x 10 and have it look sharp.

It even has a (tiny) optical viewfinder, which was a selling point for me. I've never really liked taking pictures using the screen as my viewfinder. However, once I bought the camera, I found that it was far easier to use the screen to frame the pictures rather than use the optical viewfinder. It's tiny size, and the size of the camera, make it almost useless. You can, however, save battery life if you use the optical viewfinder instead of the digital screen.

Be warned -- the buttons on this camera are small. I, a small woman, had NO trouble using them, but my husband, a large man, had trouble with the power button, which is tiny. This camera probably would not be optimal for someone with large hands.

Also, the camera's size makes it easy to drop, so this is not for children, and I would recommend always keeping the wrist strap around your wrist while using it.

It takes beautiful photos in sunlight, even in glaring sunset or darkening sky conditions. The only weaknesses I found were the following: 1) It's not great at taking close ups of flowers. For some reason it sometimes has trouble focusing when you have it zoomed in all the way. Some of my close up shots of flowers ended up out of focus or blurry - problems I never had with my Sony. 2) It decides where it wants to focus. While this "mostly" works, and obviously was designed to help novices produce better pictures, if you are trying to do something fancy, it sometimes does not want to cooperate. So, if I'm trying to get a close up of the edge of a flower, it may not focus on that (it will be blurry) but will focus on the leaf next to it instead. While there are probably was to get it to focus on what I want, I haven't found an easy solution to this.

On the pro side, because of that function (it deciding what the focus of the picture is), pictures with people in them come out wonderfully.

There are also numerous settings to help you with your picturetaking, including: portrait, sunset, kids and pets (for fast moving things), flower, landscape, fireworks, etc. I haven't yet had a chance to use many of them, but as mentioned earlier, I do like the fact that I have control over some of the settings.

All in all, and especially considering its reasonable price, I think this is a great camera to have on you at all times.

Note: I got this camera in Red -- it's absolutely stunning looking.