A firm and powerful Zoom...

Author's Rating:

Pros: Zoom, small size, picture quality, playback and review

Cons: Screen display a little grainy, doesn't like fluorescent lights, no optical video zoom

The Bottom Line: 
For beginners and beyond, this camera should keep you excited enough. With its many camera modes, easy of use, excellent zoom and picture quality, it will turn a few heads.

Author's Review
After 2 solid  weeks of reading scores of professional and general public reviews on the Canon Powershot 200sx I took the plunge and bought it. As this was my first digital camera I was somewhat apprehensive, maybe the thing would be too complex or too expensive for an entry level camera novice such as myself to take. At £243 (before the £40 cash-back offer, which took a month to arrive) perhaps a slightly older model model at £120-150 would've been a wiser purchase.

Aesthetically beautiful with a large 3" screen, x12 optical lens and 12.1 mega pixels at first impressions I seem to have made the right decision.

The flash though always pops up and stays up, for some this is annoying  for me it really means nothing, as I'm too busy learning the features and practicing picture taking.

There are many preset modes such as landscape, indoor, outdoor, people and pet, not to mention simple mode where one can not really change anything and is as fully automatic as the camera can get. The camera then goes up in complexity with each additional mode giving the user more freedom to change ISO, flash brightness, colour balance (blue tone, b/w, fluorescent, cloudy etc) light metering and more. Least I forget there is night shot 'see in the dark' mode.

There is also a scene mode that the camera presets the opitimal condions for taking snaps such as snow, fireworks, aqua and foilage condions plus an option of ISO3200 to take fast moving low light pictures.

For those with shaky fingers there's an automatic image stabilization feature that makes sure your pictures look as sold as your hands should be! Needless to say there is also pre-emptying red eye removal feature, the camera has the ability to read where the faces are in a pictures and focus on them to remove the red eye and even the closed eye. How you ask? No idea but it does work. You can switch this feature off.

The zoom was the clincher for me whilst meandering on this purchase. At x12 this gives a crucial edge of versatility for great close up shots at distance  (even up to x48 all be it grainy for the detailed pictures but very satisfactory if you don't really care that much and not looking to blow x48 holiday picture into an enormous poster.)

Of course there is the option of the video camera mode but the zoom on video mode only goes up x4. On a 8gb card the instructions write that recording is up to 43 minutes and 10 minutes with a 2gb. May I mention the camera  does not come with internally or externally any type of memory. So don't forget to buy one.
I bought a 8gb Lexar memory card for £14 at Dixons.
At the highest quality picture mode of A2 size 16x20" the camera can store 2500 pictures at 3084kg a picture and for email attachment mode its over 60000 pictures at 84kb  on average.

As with most Cannon's picture printing is excellent. This was another clincher, as at the end of the day the majority of us want a photograph in our hands.

Picture playback and review is very good. There is a sideshow, editing features such as crop or colour adjusting, extensive filling system and the ability to lock those favorite photos from being accidentally erased whilst formatting. Also auto shut off to save battery strength.

The instructions come on CD unfortunately, I would've preferred a hard version.
The Li-ion battery is charged in a supplied charger. Comes with two electricity cables one for UK and one for the Europe a big plus for me. Also there is a nice strap.

On my list to buy is carrying case and screen protector-these are not supplied

There is plenty more to be said about this model and the experts can do that for you.