Digital Home Thoughts: Finally...A point And Shoot I Can Live With! The Canon Powershot SD800-IS Reviewed

It's Not All Roses...
Canon specs the SD800 as being able to go as high as ISO 1600, but in my experience, shooting at an ISO of 400 or higher borders on unusable because of noise issues. Below is an example shot demonstrating the ISO range of the SD800 (click to see the full-sized version).


Figure 6: You can see as you move further up the ISO range, the quality takes a definite hit.

As you can see pretty clearly in the full-sized comparison the noise issue is very prevalent at the higher ISOs. Despite the fact that 400, 800, and 1600 are almost off-limits as far as noise goes, the camera does do a very good job of adjusting aperture and shutter speeds to make shooting at lower ISOs less painful. I've also had good relatively good luck cleaning up the noisiness with Neat Image, so if you don't mind a bit of extra processing at the end, you can get satisfactory results even at the higher range.

In video mode, the camera is quite good. The problem you run into, however, is that when you zoom in and out while shooting video, it's not done optically, but digitally. While it's nice that Canon thought to allow users to zoom at all during video shooting (3 prior cameras I've had wouldn't let you do it at all), the digital artifacting on zoom is unbelievably bad. So bad, in fact, that you're probably better off not zooming at all.

Another gripe is that the lens is very close to the flash, which means you're destined to have to deal with redeye. Being someone who rarely uses the flash, I don't find it to be that big of a problem, but your results may vary. Seeing as it's really easy to remove redeye anyway, it's more of annoyance than a problem.

My last gripe is something Jason actually noticed. Apparently, if you shut the camera down while in manual mode, it "forgets" your settings except for the flash setting (on / off / redeye reduced). For example, if you've set the focal length for landscape or macro, you have to reset it when you turn the camera back on. That seems like a silly oversight on Canon's part, and hopefully a firmware update is forthcoming to remedy it.

The Neatest Feature
The neatest feature of the SD800 is the Face Detection that's built in. In a nutshell, when it's turned on, you simply point the camera at a human face, and it knows that it's seeing a face. On the LCD, you'll see a special set of cross-hairs surround your subjects face (or faces, as the case may be). It's amazing to watch as the camera will constantly move the cross-hairs as your subject moves around your screen.

Face Detection will detect faces and adjust exposure and flash settings accordingly. The theory is that you won't end up blowing out details and turning your subject into an overexposed featureless ghost. Does it work? Well, actually, it does, and while it may not save you if you're too close and use the flash, it makes a difference in situations where you have no choice but to use the flash. It's just as big a help when you have a picture to take with multiple faces since the camera will help you get equal exposure for all your subjects.

Overall, this is one of a very small number of features I've seen that could be considered "gimmicky" that actually do pretty much what they claim to.

Durability
Lest you think that the SD800 is merely pretty, you'd be sorely mistaken. One morning, as I was getting ready for work, I grabbed my jacket off the couch and out of the inside breast pocket fell my then-one-day-old SD800. Needless to say, I was crushed. It made a sickening snap as it hit my beautiful parquet floor and I thought for sure I'd go to turn it on and find it smashed to bits. I reached down, saw that all the necessary bits were still in place, and threw it in my jacket pocket.


Figure 7: This picture was taken the same morning I dropped the camera. There were no ill-effects, thankfully.

On the train platform, I took the camera out to get it ready for my usual en-route-to-work photo sessions and the case had shifted where the front of the case was under the back of the case. I thought this was the end. I gently nudged the case apart and it snapped back together in perfect position. Everything was right back the way it should be as if nothing had happened. I proceeded to take the picture above and everything was 100% normal. A sigh of relief came out immediately, and I thanked my stars that I hadn't set a world record for fastest destruction of a beautiful new gadget ever.