Canon PowerShot SD10 Digital ELPH Camera

Introduction

The Canon PowerShot SD10 is the latest in a long line of digital cameras from one of the true powerhouses of photography. Canon in recent years has taken the digital camera market by storm, with a large, ever-changing array of cameras that covers the market from consumer to professional with such nuance between models that they're more than likely to have a camera suited for every kind of user. In the consumer arena, their products are distinguished by superb design, sharp lenses, and excellent color.

In both the film and digital worlds, the high-style, diminutive Canon ELPH models have been wildly popular for their small size, easy portability, fine build, and surprising image quality. Long a popular brand for APS film cameras, the Canon Digital ELPHs brought the compact size and styling to the digital world with the original S100. The new Canon PowerShot SD10 Digital ELPH takes compactness to new extremes with an extremely small, purse-friendly design.

Camera OverviewQuite a bit smaller than any preceding Canon Digital ELPH model, the PowerShot SD10 realizes more of the advantage offered by the smaller SD card format than the ELPH that first entered the SD space, the SD100. Up until the SD100, all ELPH digital cameras used Compact Flash cards. The SD10 loses a few of the SD100's features for the sake of size, among them the optical viewfinder and optical zoom. What it loses in lens it gains back in resolution though, with a nearly 4.0 megapixel imager (though called 4.0, it's actually 3,871,488 pixels). With the lens retracted, the Canon SD10's front panel is flat and pocket friendly, and its all-metal body rugged and durable. The SD10 captures high quality images, suitable for printing snapshots as large as 8x10 inches. Smaller image sizes are also available for email transmission or Web applications, and a movie mode captures short video clips with sound. Coming in four colors, the SD10 has one more important feature: Style. It was designed as the ultimate fashion accessory, as its four available colors attest. There's metallic silver with a variety of finishes (fine bead-blasted, coarse bead-blasted, polished, and fresnel), polished black, pearl white, and bronze, which looks great when carried by a red-head.

The Canon SD10 features a 6.4mm fixed focal length lens, equivalent to a 39mm lens on a 35mm camera. Aperture is automatically controlled, f/2.8 wide open. A maximum 5.7x digital zoom option adds zoom to the SD10, but keep in mind that digital zoom decreases the overall image quality, as it simply crops out and enlarges the center pixels of the CCD image. Image details are thus likely to be softer with digital zoom. Focus ranges from 4 inches (10 centimeters) to infinity in normal AF mode, and from 1.2 inches to 4 inches (3 to 10 centimeters) in Macro mode. The SD10 employs a five-point AiAF (Artificial Intelligence Autofocus) system to determine focus, which uses a broad active area in the center of the image to calculate the focal distance (a feature I've been impressed with on many ELPH models and hope to see continued). Through the Record menu, you can turn AiAF off, which defaults the autofocus to the center of the frame. Also built-in to the SD10 is an AF assist light, which aids the focus mechanism in low light. For composing images, the SD10 offers a real-image optical viewfinder, as well as a 1.5-inch color LCD monitor. The LCD reports a fair amount of camera information, but excludes exposure information such as aperture and shutter speed. In Playback mode, users can choose to display a histogram to report the tonal distribution of a captured image, useful in determining any over- or under-exposure.

Because the ELPH line capitalizes on ease of use, exposure control is typically automatic to increase the line's appeal to point-and-shoot users. The SD10 is completely automatic, but there is a Manual mode of sorts. Though it doesn't give you aperture nor shutter information, it does allow you to adjust +/-2 EV in third stop increments, white balance, ISO, and metering method. The adjustments menu is brought up by pressing the Set/Function button while in shooting mode, and stays up as you make changes, coming back after each shot making it easier to reach the setting you desire. Shutter speeds range from 1/1,500 to 15 seconds, with the one- to 15-second end of the range only available in Long Shutter mode (which also automatically invokes a Noise Reduction system to eliminate excess image noise in longer exposures). In straight Auto mode, the camera controls everything about the exposure except for file size, flash, etc. Camera operation is straightforward, as you typically just point and shoot most of the time. Pressing the Shutter button halfway sets focus and exposure, and a small LED next to the LCD viewfinder, along with a confirmation beep and green onscreen focus point let you know when the camera is ready to take the picture, as well as which areas will be in focus. The camera also has a new function called QuickShot. When enabled, QuickShot allows the user to capture a shot more quickly, apparently by setting the lens to its "hyperfocal" distance, in which subjects will be in focus at the broadest possible range of distances. This does limit its use to camera-subject distances of 1.5 foot or greater though. Inside 1.5 feet, according to the manual and our testing, images are most often out of focus and overexposed.

The SD10 uses an Evaluative metering system by default, which means that the camera divides the image area into zones and evaluates each zone to determine the best overall exposure. A Spot metering option ties the exposure to the very center of the frame, and is useful for off-center or high contrast subjects, letting you pinpoint the exact area of the frame to base the exposure on. There's also a Center-Weighted metering option, which bases the exposure on a large area in the center of the frame. Exposure Compensation increases or decreases the overall exposure from -2 to +2 exposure equivalents (EV) in one-third step increments. A White Balance option offers Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, and Custom (manual) settings. The SD10 also offers a creative Photo Effects menu, which include Vivid, Neutral, Low Sharpening, Sepia, and Black and White modes. Sensitivity equivalents include 50, 100, 200, and 400 ISO settings, as well as an Auto adjustment. The SD10's built-in flash operates in Auto, Forced On, Suppressed, Red-Eye Reduction, and Slow-Synchro modes. You can also lock the flash exposure in the same way you can lock normal exposure. Pressing the Shutter button halfway and keeping it pressed initiates the exposure lock, signaled by two beeps.

A two- or 10-second self-timer option counts down by flashing a small LED on the front of the camera before firing the shutter, giving you time to duck around the camera and get into your own shots. Stitch-Assist mode is the SD10's panoramic shooting mode, which lets you shoot as many as 26 consecutive images. The series of images can then be "stitched" together into a single panoramic frame with the accompanying software. The SD10 also has a Movie Record mode, which records moving images with sound for as long as three minutes per clip, depending on the resolution setting and amount of memory card space. (Movies are recorded at either 640 x 480, 320 x 240, or 160 x 120 pixels.) Finally, a Continuous Shooting mode captures a series of consecutive images (much like a motor drive on a traditional camera), at approximately one frame per second, as long as the Shutter button is held down. The actual frame rate varies with the resolution setting, with the total number of images also depending on the amount of memory card space and file size. The SD10 can capture up to four shots in rapid sequence at its largest file size and highest JPEG quality setting, or more than forty shots at the smallest/lowest quality setting.

The My Camera settings menu lets you customize camera settings to a specific theme. Everything from the startup image to operating sounds can be assigned to a theme, either one of the pre-programmed themes or one downloaded from the camera software or stored on the memory card. The SD10 also lets you record short sound clips to accompany captured images, via the Sound Memo option, great for lively captions to vacation photos or party shots.

The SD10 stores images on SD memory cards (hence, the "SD" in its name). A 32MB card accompanies the camera, which is twice the size of the card that came with the SD100, but I still recommend picking up a larger capacity card, at least 64 megabytes, so you don't miss any shots; 128 is even better. The camera utilizes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack for power, which accompanies the camera, along with the necessary battery charger, a small brick with flip out power prongs. Because the SD10 does not accommodate AA-type batteries in any form, I strongly advise picking up an additional battery pack and keeping it freshly charged. The optional AC adapter is useful for preserving battery power when reviewing and downloading images, and actually uses a "dummy" battery that inserts into the camera's battery compartment. A USB cable and interface software are also packaged with the camera, for downloading images to a computer and performing minor organization and corrections. Two software CDs provide the necessary drivers and editing software, both compatible with Windows and Macintosh platforms. One CD holds Canon's Digital Camera Solution Disk version 12.0 and the other features ArcSoft's Camera Suite version 1.2. Finally, an A/V cable connects the SD10 to a television set, for reviewing and composing images. The SD10 is Digital Print Order Format (DPOF) compatible, with detailed print settings in the Playback menu. Canon offers a selection of direct-connect printers as well, which simplifies printing even more.