Canon PowerShot SD110 review: Canon PowerShot SD110

Canon PowerShot SD110
Busy snapshot photographers looking for an inexpensive, pocketable camera will appreciate the 3-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD110's no-nonsense ease of operation. This ultracompact model has some of the same limitations as earlier Digital Elphs: a lack of manual controls and scene modes, as well as only a 2X optical zoom instead of the more typical 3X range. Equipped with Canon's Print/Share button for one-touch printing to Canon Direct Photo and PictBridge-compatible printers, the SD110 is best suited to those who value simplicity over flexibility. The Canon PowerShot SD110's stainless-steel body measures a pocket-size 3.3 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches and weighs in at 6.5 ounces with rechargeable battery and SD/MMC media onboard. Even a novice should be able to master its well-marked, if quirky, control arrangement in minutes.

The top surface features a large shutter-release button concentric with a zoom lever, a power-on LED, and a slightly recessed power button. The shutter release falls easily under your index finger, with your thumb poised over the back-mounted mode dial.

The layout of the back panel is slightly unconventional, but our quibbles are minor. The rocker switch you use to navigate menus and select basic shooting options doesn't have a center Set button to confirm selections. This control is located, instead, at the far left, under the 1.5-inch LCD.

Setup and shooting options menus are accessed via two different buttons. The Function key gives access to exposure compensation, white balance, ISO, color effects, compression level, and resolution. A Menu key produces three pages of other options for shooting and setup when the camera is in recording mode; in preview mode, it offers an additional set of choices for protecting and rotating pictures, displaying slide shows, and creating print orders. The Display button switches the LCD off and on, or it reveals the current shooting settings. Switch to playback mode, and a full array of information about the shot being reviewed appears, including a helpful histogram.

The Canon PowerShot SD110's feature set is a little on the spartan side. The anemic zoom range of the 35mm-to-70mm (35mm-camera equivalent) lens is best suited for making minor framing adjustments, and the optics focus no closer than 4 inches in macro mode. There are no programmed scene modes, such as Sports, except for the dim-light Long Shutter option for 1- to 15-second exposures. Nor can you choose aperture or shutter priority, set exposure, or focus manually. Exposure compensation (plus or minus 2EV in 1/3EV steps) can be selected from an LCD menu, along with ISO adjustments (50 to 400), white-balance options, slow-sync flash for night photography, and a panorama-friendly stitch mode. Only a few special effects are available, including Vivid Color with enhanced saturation, Neutral for reduced contrast and color saturation, Low Sharpening, Sepia, and Black And White.

The PowerShot SD110's nine-point light-assisted autofocus is fun to use. The system attempts to guess the center of interest for your picture, and when you partially depress the shutter release, it displays one or more green boxes on the LCD to show the area that will be in sharpest focus. Center-point focus is also available.

Another cool feature is the autorotation option, which senses whether a picture was taken in Landscape or Portrait orientation, then displays the shot right side up during review. If sound and motion clips ring your chimes, you can shoot up to 30 seconds of AVI video at 640x480 pixels or 3 minutes at 320x240 or 160x120 resolution; you can also attach voice memos up to 60 seconds long to each image. You can choose three different levels of JPEG compression, but no other still-image format is available.

Snapshooters will be pleased with the Canon PowerShot SD110's overall performance. Wake-up time to first picture was acceptable at about 3.7 seconds, and we were able to snap off pictures at 1.6-second intervals thereafter (4.96 seconds with flash).

With high-contrast subject matter, the camera autofocused quickly enough that shutter lag was a decent 0.8 second, but low-contrast subjects inflated the delay to about 1.9 seconds, even with the Elph's autofocus-assist light working. Like its siblings, this PowerShot has a Quick Shot mode that freezes the LCD, reducing shutter lag to 0.4 second. Burst mode delivered 8 frames in 4.24 seconds at full resolution, and 107 shots in about 60 seconds at 640x480 resolution.

The 1.5-inch LCD shows the full image frame, has adjustable brightness, and is usable in full sunlight, making it a better viewing choice than the optical viewfinder, which clips off part of the image and has no diopter adjustment.

Battery life was good, producing 482 pictures--half with flash--during a workout that included zooming, lots of LCD photo review, and other functions that eat juice. Travelers will love the two-ounce, 2.75-by-2-by-1-inch battery charger with flip-up AC socket prongs that requires no bulky cord.

The flash range extends from 1.5 to 10 feet at wide angle or to 6.6 feet at the telephoto setting and is limited to 11 to 18 inches in macro mode

Image quality was good, with excellent automatic exposures that had lots of detail in both highlights and shadows and rich, fully saturated colors. The Canon PowerShot SD110's images compared favorably with photos from its 4-megapixel cousin, the PowerShot S410, but this model did produce images that were lower in contrast and had pronounced purple fringing in harsh lighting conditions. Flesh tones tended to be a little yellow. Noise didn't develop until higher ISO settings (ISO 200 and 400), and the PowerShot SD110 has automatic noise reduction for exposures of 1.3 seconds or longer.