The Canon Powershot SX210 IS

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent image quality
Very good HD movie mode
14x zoom

Cons: Grainy LCD screen
Expensive

The Bottom Line: 
If I was in the market for a digicam right now, the SX210 IS would be on my short list.

Author's Review
I loved Canon’s “S” series digicams (the S3 and S5 were both superb image capture devices) and I was a bit leery of the “SX” series that replaced them.  But, I’ve come to regard the “SX” series as (mostly)  worthy successors to the benchmark “S” series.  “SX” series digicams are smaller, lighter, and more feature rich than their predecessors.  On balance, Canon’s Powershot SX210 IS compact-ultrazoom may be the best overall camera choice for many consumers, since it nicely meets Goldilocks “just right” criteria – it isn’t too big, it isn’t too small, it isn’t too heavy, and the 14x zoom is just right - not too short and not too long. The SX210 (in auto mode) can be used by absolute beginners, but this camera also offers sufficient creative flexibility to be used effectively by more advanced photographers.

The SX210, which updates the popular SX200, features a 14x zoom (the SX200 has a 12x zoom) and a smaller lighter body than its predecessor.  The mode dial has been shifted from the SX200’s top deck to the back of the SX210.  Improving on the nifty Face Detection self-timer featured on the SX200, the SX210 adds Smile and Wink modes (the camera will wait to take the picture until it detects a smile or after a wink from the subject) and a sensitivity boost from ISO3200 to ISO6400 for enhanced low light shooting.  Experienced shooters will have no difficulty using the SX210 right out of the box and even absolute beginners should be able to capture impressive images after a short familiarization period with the camera and a brief scan of the quick start guide.
 
NUTS & BOLTS

Viewfinder/LCD 

Like most of today’s P&S digicams, the SX210 IS doesn't provide an optical viewfinder, so shooters must use the 3.0 inch widescreen LCD (with 230K resolution) for all framing/composition, captured image review and menu navigation chores. Most casual shooters don’t use optical viewfinders anyway and in many shooting scenarios (macro and portraits, for example), it is often quicker and easier to watch the decisive moment come together on the LCD screen than it is through an optical viewfinder.

The SX210’s LCD screen displays a standard 4:3 aspect ratio when shooting still images, but users get the full 16:9 widescreen display on the LCD when shooting/reviewing in movie mode.   

I’m a bit surprised that Canon didn’t update the SX210 IS’s paltry 230,000 pixel LCD, since they boosted sensor resolution and lengthened the zoom. LCD resolution has been increasing, as consumers demand larger, sharper, and quicker (faster refresh rates) LCDs.  Two similar premium P&S digicams provide an example.  Canon’s S95 features an LCD screen with 461,000 pixels, and the Nikon S8000 features a 920,000 pixel LCD screen. The SX210 IS’s TFT LCD screen is fairly bright, hue accurate, relatively fluid (not jerky), automatically boosts gain in dim/low light, and covers 100% of the image frame, but the display is a bit grainy. The SX210 IS's LCD, like all LCD monitors, is subject to fading and glare/reflections in bright outdoor lighting, making outdoor composition difficult – a situation that is exacerbated by this camera’s lower resolution LCD.  LCD brightness and contrast ratios are both noticeably lower than one would expect with a $250.00 upper-tier P&S digicam.

Zoom Lens

The SX210 IS’s 14x f/3.1-f5.9/5.0mm -70mm (28mm - 392 mm equivalent) zoom makes this Powershot almost ideal for a broad variety of photographic applications – including shooting group pictures in tight indoor venues, capturing expansive landscapes, nailing wildlife, shooting youth sports like a pro, and getting up-close macro shots of bugs and flowers.  When the SX210 IS is powered up - the lens automatically extends from the camera body and when the camera is powered down, the zoom retracts into the camera body and a built in iris-style lens cover closes to protect the front element. 

The SX210 IS’s zoom is impressively compact and light-weight, but it is not flimsy - this is a solidly built highly (optically) corrected lens, but it is (unavoidably) a fairly complex lens and as complexity increases lens faults are magnified exponentially.  The SX210 IS’s zoom starts at the equivalent of 28mm and ranges to the equivalent of 392mm.  Corners are noticeably soft at the wide angle end of the range, but they are appreciably sharper at the telephoto end of the zoom. 
 
The SX210 IS’s f3.1 maximum aperture (at the wide angle end of the zoom range) is fast enough for almost anything this camera’s target audience is likely to shoot, but the f5.9 maximum aperture at the telephoto end of the zoom range is fairly slow – pretty much useless for anything other than shooting outdoors in decent light.  Zoom operation is fast, smooth, and fairly quiet, but this lens exhibits noticeable barrel distortion (straight lines bow out from the center) at the wide-angle end of the zoom and visible pincushion distortion (straight lines bow in toward the center of the frame) at the telephoto end of the zoom range.  Chromatic aberration (purple fringing) is present, especially in high contrast shooting, but managed very nicely.  Overall, the SX210 IS’s new 14x zoom is surprisingly good.

Image Stabilization (IS)

The SX210 IS’s optical image stabilization system reduces blur by quickly and precisely shifting a lens element in the zoom to compensate for involuntary camera movement. Image stabilization allows users to shoot at shutter speeds up to three f-stops slower than would have been possible without IS. Image stabilization can also be useful when shooting dimly lit indoor venues where flash is prohibited or inappropriate. SX210 IS users have four IS options – continuous IS, shoot only IS, Panning IS, and IS off.

Auto Focus (AF) 
 
The SX210 IS features the same TTL Contrast Detection 9-point AF system as its predecessor. It has three AF modes: Face AF, Tracking AF, and Center AF. In all exposure modes, the camera analyzes the scene in front of the lens and then calculates camera-to-subject distance to determine which AF point is closest to the primary subject (closest subject priority) and then locks focus on that AF point. The SX210 IS’s default face detection AF mode is linked to the camera's exposure and WB systems. The camera automatically finds, locks focus on, tracks and then optimizes exposure for up to nine faces or shooters can lock on a single face and track it through a crowd. The SX210 IS’s Center AF option is good for traditional landscapes and even better for street shooting, because serious photographers don't want the camera deciding which face in the crowd to focus on. AF is dependably quick and accurate.

Flash
 
The SX210 IS’s tiny multi mode pop-up flash provides an acceptable selection of artificial lighting options, including Auto, Manual, Red-eye Reduction, Auto Red-eye Correction, Flash On, Flash Off; FE Lock, Safety FE, and Slow Synch plus menu flash options including flash exposure compensation (+/- 2EV in 1/3 EV increments) and first or second curtain synch. According to Canon, the maximum flash range is about 11.5 feet, which seems optimistic given the miniscule size of the flash. Based on my very limited flash use, the SX210 IS's flash recycle time is between 4 and 5 seconds. The flash pops up automatically when the camera is turned on, but that irritating feature can be disabled.  The SX210 IS’s flash is very small and consequently noticeably underpowered.
 
Power  
 
According to Canon, the SX210 IS is good for about 260 exposures (without flash) or 300 minutes of video on a freshly charged NB-5L Lithium-ion power pack. That's noticeably shorter power duration than average for cameras in this class.

Memory Media

The Canon PowerShot SX210 IS supports SD, SDHC, and the SDXC format (for memory cards larger than 32GB), but provides no internal memory.

EXPOSURE

Exposure is automatically managed by the SX210 IS’s 1/2.3" CCD sensor driven by Canon’s impressively quick DIGIC IV processor, which combines most primary camera functions (image interpolation and processing, auto exposure, white balance, sensitivity, JPEG compression, gain control, and power management) in one chip to improve efficiency and processing speed.

Menus and Modes

The Canon PowerShot SX210 IS features a three tab version of Canon's classic digicam menu system – The menu system, accessed via a dedicated button, is logical and easy to navigate.  The SX210 IS provides a comprehensive selection of shooting modes including:

Easy: The camera automatically selects all exposure parameters, except flash on/off, just point and shoot.
Auto: Point-and-shoot mode with automatic scene selection. Most menu options are unavailable.
Program: Auto exposure with limited user input (sensitivity, white balance, exposure compensation, etc.)
Indoor: Mode dial scene mode
Kids & Pets: Mode dial scene mode
Night Snapshot: Mode dial scene mode
Landscape: Mode dial scene mode
Portrait: Mode dial scene mode
Scene: Smart Shutter, low light, color accent, color swap, fisheye effect, miniature effect, beach, foliage, snow, fireworks, Stitch Assist
Aperture priority: Users select the aperture and the camera selects an appropriate shutter speed.
Shutter priority: Users select shutter speed and the camera selects an appropriate aperture.
Manual: Users select all exposure parameters.
Movie: The SX210 IS records HD video at a maximum resolution of 1280x720 (720p) @ 30 fps for up to 4GB or one hour.

White Balance (WB) 

The SX210 IS provides users with a very good selection of White Balance options, including Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, and Custom (Manual). The SX210 IS’s auto WB system does a very good job in most lighting, but like all of Canon's consumer cameras, the auto WB setting produces colors that are noticeably warmer than real world colors under incandescent light and slightly cooler than real world colors under fluorescent lighting.
 
Sensitivity (ISO)
 
The SX210 IS provides a very impressive range of sensitivity options, including auto ISO user-set options for ISO 80 to 6400. ISO 80 and ISO 100 images are virtually indistinguishable; both show bright colors, slightly hard edged but somewhat flat contrast and very low noise levels. ISO 200 images were also very good, but with a tiny bit less pop. At the ISO 400 setting, noise levels are noticeably higher and there's a (barely) perceptible loss of minor detail.  ISO 800 images are noisy, but not as noisy as expected. Higher sensitivity settings show flat colors, reduced contrast, lots of noise, and fuzzy details.

CONTROLS, DESIGN, ENGINEERING, BUILD QUALITY, & ERGONOMICS
 
Design-wise the SX210 IS has only a passing resemblance to the SX200 it replaces. The SX210 IS looks and handles like a point-and-shoot digicam, but it feels solid and stable in your hands.  The user interface is logical and uncomplicated - all buttons and controls are a bit small, but they are all clearly marked, sensibly placed and easily accessed, for right handed shooters. The SX210 IS’s compass switch (4-way controller) provides direct access to the exposure compensation function, flash settings, and macro mode.  Canon’s “func” button offers direct access to WB, ISO, image size, etc.  The compass switch is surrounded by a rotary jog dial.  Press the review button and use your right thumb on the rotary jog dial to quickly and easily scroll back and forth through your saved images. 

The SX210 IS is a precision built and robustly constructed imaging tool that was obviously designed for serious shooters. The SX210 IS, unlike the auto-everything point-and-shoot digital cameras swamping the high tech marketplace these days, permits lots of individual input into the image making process via an enhanced feature set, plenty of creative flexibility and manual control of exposure.  I’m not sure why Canon utilized an easily stripped plastic tripod socket rather than a more durable metal insert, but I suspect it was to save a few pennies on the per unit cost.  That decision, like the SX210 IS’s lower resolution LCD, seems pennywise and pound foolish to me, since this is supposed to be an upper tier digicam.

In the Field/Handling & Operation
 
Since I’m a known photo geek and almost always have a camera with me, friends often ask me for advice when they are in the market for a new camera.  That’s great and I can usually provide a recommendation or two after asking a few salient questions.  What I don’t like is when friends, acquaintances, and business associates ask me to look at their malfunctioning cameras and assess for them whether repair is possible.  

I recently visited with an acquaintance who owns a business on Bardstown Road.  He is a colorful old dude who has been the subject of a couple of really good environmental portraits for me.  When he told me that his relatively new digicam (which I helped him select) was no longer functioning I agreed to take a look at it if he would let me keep it for a week or so.  He agreed and handed me his Canon Powershot SX210 IS.  When I got home I sat down with the camera and turned it on. I saw immediately that the problem was a card error.  I removed my acquaintances 2GB SDHC card and replaced it with one of mine and instantly the SX210 IS was ready to rock and roll.  I then tried my acquaintance’s SD card in a Casio H20G and got the same card error.  Problem solved – damaged media card. 

I had used the SX200 a couple of times and I was interested in how the SX210 IS compared with the SX200, which I liked. Since my acquaintance didn’t expect the camera back for a week or two I decided to put it through its paces and write a review for epinions.  I was testing a Casio Exilim EX H20G (for another website) at that time.  Both cameras were small enough to slip in a jacket pocket, so I took both digicams with me everywhere I went for a couple of weeks.  I ended up liking the Canon more than the Casio

The first thing I did was to run some color tests. I use a homemade macro stage (a medium sized cardboard box with the top and front cut away) and a selection of brightly colored (red, green, yellow, blue, orange, and purple) plastic children’s beach toys arrayed on a white background. This test allows me to check color accuracy and the precision of each camera's white balance system and compare the results from camera to camera. The SX210 IS’s Auto White Balance setting faithfully rendered hue correct color for all the plastic beach toys, but the red pail was a bit brighter and more intense in my images (viewed on a NEC 19” CRT monitor) than it is IRL. Default color interpolation is a bit warm, which is not surprising in a camera targeted toward the advanced amateur/photo enthusiast market niche.

My first outing with the SX210 IS was to Cave Hill Cemetery. Cave Hill is one of the best remaining examples of 19th century U. S. landscape architecture and a popular destination for local photographers, even in the middle of the winter. There is always something to photograph at this old burying ground, no matter the season. Cave Hill’s 300 acres are filled with an almost dizzying collection of (native and exotic) trees, shrubs, bushes, and plants plus thousands of old headstones, dozens of ornate mausoleums, a rustic old groundskeeper’s cottage, and a small lake (with hundreds of resident ducks, geese, and swans).

The last month or so we've had some really nasty weather in the Ohio River Valley - cold gray days with lots of rain, snow, and ice. I spent the afternoon shooting a wide variety of subjects – weatherworn old tombstones in the oldest section of cemetery, and Eastern Red Cedar, American Holly, Magnolia, Chokeberry, Mountain Ash, and Barberry trees which still retained a bit of color even in the dead of winter.  I also shot images of folks feeding the resident (and always hungry) waterfowl around the lake.

My next outing with the SX210 IS took me to Louisville’s Extreme Park. The Extreme Park is the go to place for local photographers looking to capture action. Skateboarders and BMX bikers are drawn to the park (even when the weather is horrid) to perfect their moves in the industrial sized full pipe, 5 interconnected bowls, and twelve-foot half pipe. Many of the kids at the Extreme Park are talented athletes and most of them love showing off for the camera. On the day of my visit the weather was cold and overcast with dull light, but no rain, snow or wind.

BMX bikers move faster than skateboarders and they need a little more frame space to accommodate their bikes, so shooting bikers is a bit tougher than shooting skateboarders. What I generally do is to watch each of the BMXer’s do his routine a couple of times to isolate the moments when the most dramatic action will occur – then track the kid through his run and nail him when he does his most impressive mid-air move. With most cameras (especially consumer  P&S digicams) I have to anticipate the peak action moment by ¼ to ½ of a second (so the camera has time to lock focus and trip the shutter) and that was the case with the SX210 IS. 

I also used the SX210 IS in my acquaintance’s cluttered and dimly lit shop, outdoors just after a fresh snowfall, at my favorite super market (colorful veggie and fruit displays), and one very cold (16 degrees) sunny morning when all the limbs and branches of the trees on my street were encased in an inch thick layer of ice. The SX210 IS performed flawlessly (outdoors) in Program mode (with auto WB and auto ISO) and also did a pretty decent job indoors.  I returned the SX210 IS to my acquaintance and gave him a quick lesson in how to properly insert an SD card into the media card well of the SX210 IS.  My acquaintance was very pleased that all he had to do was buy another SD card to put his camera back on line.  
 
PERFORMANCE

Image Quality
 
The SX210 IS's image files are clearly optimized for bold bright hues and hard-edged but slightly flat contrast. Overall, reds are a bit warm, blues are a little brighter than they are in real life and greens are impressively vibrant, though purples tend toward blue. The SX210 IS’s images are highly-detailed and surprisingly sharp, although I did have some problems (the AF system couldn't always lock focus) in macro mode and a small percentage of my close-up shots came out blurry. In bright outdoor lighting, highlight detail was only rarely blown-out, which is very impressive color interpolation and exposure engineering. Comparatively, the SX210 IS’s image quality is marginally better than that of the Casio H20 G.

Video Quality
 
The SX210 IS's 1280x720 (720p) @ 30fps HD movie mode produces sharply focused, properly exposed, color correct videos clips. I shot several short video clips and they were consistently impressive.  I'm impressed by the amazing things today's shooters can do. As a guy who got into photography in the early seventies I've seen imaging technology grow from totally mechanical cameras with no electronics (save a built-in light meter) to point and shoot still imaging platforms with HD digital video capability that rivals a dedicated video camera.

By way of example a young New York City woman recently shot a feature length movie called "Tiny Furniture" using one Canon P&S digital camera (model not specified) for the whole production. Her movie (which cost $45,000 to make) is showing now in fairly wide release and to some critical acclaim.  In addition to the HD mode, SX210 IS users can also shoot video at either VGA (640 x 480) or QVGA (320 x 240) resolution. Video is saved in Motion JPEG AVI format and audio is recorded in stereo. 
 
Shutter Lag/Timing
 
Timing (speed) is a major consideration, second only to image quality in importance, when assessing digital camera performance. The SX210 IS comes in right in the middle of the pack when compared to its competition (Panasonic ZS7 and Nikon S8000)  In practical terms the SX210 IS is competitive across the board in terms of operational quickness.  

Conclusion
 
Buying a digital camera is not as easy as it was in the early days of the digital camera revolution, and that is a good thing for consumers.  Today’s digital camera marketplace is like a treasure chest filled to the brim with new and often exciting imaging products. Shutterbugs of every stripe, from pro shooters to soccer moms, have more choices than they’ve ever had before. Sorting through the absolute plethora of digicams available today consumers must eliminate the cameras that are too big, too small, too complex, too simple, and too expensive until they find the digital camera that is just right for them and since there is no perfect camera, consumers must search for the compromise model that best meets their needs for a price they can afford.   

My photographic heroes have always been street-shooters like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau and documentary photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Walker Evens.

Straight photography (Street, documentary, and environmental portraiture) is primarily concerned with capturing images of people in uncontrived, naturally lit and candid settings that evocatively depict or dramatically reveal some aspect of the human condition. In addition to being a first rate general purpose digicam, the nifty little SX210 is almost perfect for “straight” photography - it is compact, responsive, unobtrusive, features a 14x zoom (for a little extra standoff room) and dependably generates first rate images.