Introduction
The Canon PowerShot SD20 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. The Canon SD20 is the latest in a line of ultra-compact Canon digital cameras, marked under their ELPH brand name. The Canon SD20 is replaces the SD10 introduced in early 2004, boosting resolution to 5 megapixels, as well as updating features somewhat. The Canon PowerShot SD20 is one of the smallest and sleekest-looking digital cameras on the market, but manages to take very good photos, and offer a fair range of control in an impressively small, purse- (or pocket-) friendly design. Read on for all the details, this is an excellent little camera for style-conscious consumers.
Quite a bit smaller than most Canon Digital ELPH models, the Canon PowerShot SD20 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 Canon SD20 is actually an update to the nearly identical SD10, only now this nice little camera has a 5.0 megapixel sensor, and a slight reshuffle of the available features. With the lens retracted, the Canon SD20's front panel is flat and pocket friendly, and its all-metal body rugged and durable. The SD20 captures high quality images, suitable for printing snapshots as large as 11 x 14, or 8 x 10 inches with some cropping. 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 SD20 has one more important feature: Style. It was designed as the ultimate fashion accessory, now with four new colors to prove the point. There's Garnet, Midnight Blue, Zen Gray, and Silver.
The Canon PowerShot SD20 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 6.5x digital zoom option adds zoom to the SD20, 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 SD20 employs a nine-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 have been pleased 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 Canon SD20 is an AF assist light, which aids the focus mechanism in low light. For composing images, the SD20 has only a 1.5-inch color LCD monitor, no optical viewfinder. This allowed the designers to make a smaller camera, and will not likely be missed by the target audience. 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 Canon SD20 is completely automatic, but there is a Manual mode of sorts. Though it doesn't give you aperture or shutter information, it does allow you to adjust +/-2 EV in third stop increments, as well as adjust white balance, ISO, and select among metering methods. 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. This makes 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 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 Canon PowerShot SD20 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 SD20 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 SD20'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 SD20'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 on a computer with the accompanying software. The SD20 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 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 SD20 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 Canon PowerShot SD20 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 SD20 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 21.0 and the other features ArcSoft's Camera Suite version 1.3. Finally, an A/V cable connects the SD20 to a television set, for reviewing and composing images. The SD20 is Digital Print Order Format (DPOF) compatible, with detailed print settings in the Playback menu. PictBridge allows easy printing without a computer, and works with many Canon printers, as well as PictBridge-enabled printers from other manufacturers.
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