Canon PowerShot SX110 IS Review
BY: David Rasnake, DigitalCameraReview.com EditorPUBLISHED: 9/26/2008
Blame it on their portability. Blame it on their great price-to-performance ratios. Blame it on the fact that people like something that's a little bit different. Whatever the reasons, compact ultrazooms – cameras that offer long lens performance in a smaller body – are one of the hottest segments of the digital camera market at the moment.
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Even with all the energy around these kinds of cameras, Canon appeared to take the cautious design approach to its entry into this class for 2008, introducing a mild update to the 10x zoom SX100 in the form of the Canon PowerShot SX110 IS. On the surface, there's not a lot about the SX110 to set it apart from its predecessor. But the SX100 is a good camera, and with a few crucial refinements and an attractive price for the SX110, Canon may yet be onto something here.
FEATURES OVERVIEW | FORM, FIT, AND FEEL |
PERFORMANCE | IMAGE QUALITY |
CONCLUSIONS | SPECIFICATIONS |
FEATURES OVERVIEW
The Canon PowerShot SX110 IS is the latest model from Canon representing the emerging compact ultrazoom segment of the market – cameras with the size and design of a traditional compact point-and-shoot, but with zoom ranges more like that of an ultrazoom. In Canon's case, a 10x zoom with an equivalent focal length of 36-360mm earns the camera its "ultrazoom" designation, and a body similar in size and style to the larger Canon PowerShot A models its "compact" status.
Positioned as slightly up-market products, compact ultrazooms tend to bring a few more features than their regular compact counterparts, and the 9 megapixel SX110 (up slightly from the 8 megapixel sensor in the SX100 it replaces) is no exception. An excellent 3.0 inch LCD is one crucial upgrade, making the camera a joy to use in the field. Having optical image stabilization is also key, especially for a camera with this kind of zoom range. Canon's DIGIC III processor underpins the whole thing, providing responsiveness, known AF performance, and arguably the best face detection system around: as with other DIGIC III cameras, the SX110 is able to lock onto profiles better than ever before and track a moving face within the frame.
With its broad market of potential buyers, the SX110 has to cover a lot of ground in terms of user knowledge as well, offering everything from a Easy shooting mode with essentially no user control to a full manual exposure mode where every setting is in your hands.
I've resigned myself to the fact that I will simply never understand the logic behind which scene modes Canon puts on the mode dial of its compact cameras, and which ones it reserves for scene position menu. In the case of the SX110, your more readily accessible mode dial options include a couple of the expected ones (portrait and landscape), but also some odd choices. The ubiquity of night portrait modes in positions of prominence on this and other cameras, for instance, suggests to me that more people must be taking people shots outdoors at night than I realize. I do like the fact that they saw fit to put the indoor preset, which provides all of the settings you need to grab snaps of moving subjects indoors in a single location, up on the dial.
To be a stick in the mud about the whole thing, I would have preferred a single scene position and less clutter on the mode dial, but others will probably disagree disagree. So be it.
Video options on the SX110 are pretty basic, with the camera prompting you to shoot in either regular (640x480) or basic (320x240) mode. You can't use the optical zoom in movie recording mode, and considering how much noise it makes when zooming, you probably wouldn't want to.
Finally, I'm a big fan of the fact that the SX110 lets you simply push the playback button to turn on the camera directly into playback mode. No need to wait for the lens to extend, even.
For a detailed listing of specifications and features, please refer to the specifications table found at the bottom of the review.
Styling and Build Quality
When it comes to its PowerShot cameras, Canon has definitely infused more style into the most recent models when compared to those from a few years back. This has been a double edged sword in some ways, though, because while the latest PowerShot cameras aren't the boring boxes for which Canon was once known, they don't always exude the same tank-like reliability, either.
Thankfully, the SX110 has little of the thin plastic feeling of some of its lower-tier A-model siblings. Although the body is mostly composite material, everything is well fitted. Body and panel flex are basically nonexistent, and the buttons feel like they could have easily been borrowed from one of Canon's mid-level DSLRs.
Overall, befitting its premium status, the SX110 does the best job of any Canon PowerShot we've seen in the last few generations of combining both of these design objectives – stylishness and ruggedness – into a single device.
Ergonomics and Interface
The biggest problem with the SX110's challenge to cameras like the Panasonic TZ5 may be its size. Although it's styled identically to the latest PowerShot A cameras, what pictures of the SX110 don't always accurately convey is its size: although it's thinner than the previous model in this line, it's slightly larger in every other dimension, and this fact alone makes the camera too large for all but the most capacious pockets.
Canon PowerShot A1000 IS (left) and SX110 IS
Having plenty of physical space to work with, however, makes the SX110 actually quite comfortable ergonomically. A slight grip bump provides stability, and the back-panel control layout is extremely easy to navigate, with large buttons and a solid, easy-to-operate control wheel. Everything's pretty tightly grouped around the control wheel, with the Print/Share button (which, in this camera as well, does double duty as a custom function control) the only outlier.
Canon continues to provide light refinements rather than major overhauls to their long-running, sidebar driven visual interface. As we've said before with other Canons, if you've used a camera from the manufacturer in the last decade, you should quickly settle into the SX110's arrangement.
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