Canon Powershot SD3500 review: Canon Powershot SD3500

Typical of the Digital Elph series, the SD3500 IS is reasonably small, good-looking, and available in different colors: black, silver, and pink. It's stylish without being flashy and can comfortably slip in a pants pocket or small handbag. The LCD and ultrawide-angle lens give it some weight, though, and the all-metal casing makes it feel sturdy. The only real issue with the overall design, however, is the position of the flash high on the left side, which can be blocked by a finger if you're not careful. (To be fair, there's not much room for it to be elsewhere.)

The SD3500 IS is controlled much more by touch than the SD980 IS. That camera still had a number of physical controls, while the SD3500 drops to just power, play, and shutter release buttons and a shooting mode switch on the top of the body. There's a zoom ring around the shutter release, but otherwise the controls are touch-based. The screen is twice the resolution and a 0.5-inch bigger than that model's, too.

The screen is fairly responsive and can be calibrated to your touch, but the interface itself can be a little trying at times to navigate. For example, when navigating the option lists in the main menu system, instead of using simple up and down arrows, you drag the lists with your finger. This would be fine if it operated smoothly, but it doesn't, and if you use the right side of the screen you may accidently change settings to boot. In its favor, though, the shooting options specific to the mode you're in can quickly be changed with a couple of taps and Canon includes a couple options to rearrange the layout.

The best use for a touch screen is for focusing on specific subjects by tapping on them, which this Canon does. It will also track the subject, making the feature even more valuable. However, unlike many newer touch-screen cameras, you cannot tap to focus and shoot. Canon even dropped the onscreen shutter release that appeared whenever the SD980 was turned vertically.

In Playback mode, the touch screen can be used for flipping through or scrolling between images, selecting photos to delete or mark as favorites, starting a slideshow, and magnifying a section of a photo by tapping on the part you want to see more closely. Canon also includes its Active Display technology letting you move back and forth between photos and checking focus on still images by tilting the camera left or right. You can also tap the left and right sides to move one frame at a time through your shots. Photos can be tagged as favorites or quickly categorized by subject for easy filtering when looking through a lot of images.

Should you want to connect to a computer, monitor, or HDTV, there are Mini-USB and Mini-HDMI ports on the body's right side. The battery and memory card compartment is on the bottom under a nonlocking door. This Canon supports the new SDXC card format as well as Eye-Fi SD cards for wireless transfers of photos directly from the camera. The battery does not charge in camera, and that touch screen doesn't do its shot life any favors, so you'll probably find yourself opening the compartment quite a bit.

Other than Canon's very reliable Smart Auto mode, there's nothing terribly interesting about the SD3500's shooting options. The shooting mode switch on top of the camera has three options: one for Auto, one for Movie mode (capturing up to 720p HD resolution), and a camera mode (that's what I'm calling it since it's designated by a picture of a camera). The camera mode gives you access to a Program Auto mode as well as all the scene modes including Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids&Pets, Low Light, Indoor, Beach, Foliage, Snow, Fireworks, and Long Shutter. Canon added a Smart Shutter option, too, which includes a smile-activated shutter release as well as Wink and Face Detection self-timers. Wink allows you to set off the shutter simply by winking at the camera and the Face Detection option will wait till the camera detects a new face in front of the camera before it fires off a shot. Both work well.

In addition to the company's standard creative shooting options--Color Accent and Color Swap--it's introduced a few new modes for 2010. One is a Miniature Effect, which blurs the top and bottom of the frame and boosts contrast and color saturation to make subjects look like painted miniature models. It works to some degree, but is not as convincing as true tilt-shift photography, which is what the effect is based on. Another mode, Fish-eye Effect, is even less effective because like the Miniature Effect, it's just an approximation done with software of what a fish-eye lens creates. That said, they're included and can be fun to play with if only to add some interest to what would be an otherwise boring shot. The camera also has a Creative Light Effect mode that changes the shape of twinkling lights in your photos to hearts, stars, butterflies, music notes, or crosses. It's silly and I'm still trying to forget that it's included and somehow a panorama assist mode was not.

Shooting performance is generally slow, meaning it's not a good option for fast moving subjects; this is the case for most compact cameras, however. Shutter lag--the time it takes to capture an image once the shutter release is pressed--is 0.6 second in good lighting and 1 second in low light. Shot-to-shot times are somewhat long, too, at 2.5 and 4.2 seconds, without and with flash, respectively. What's worse is that the camera actually feels slow. It's not all bad news, though. From off to first shot is a brisk 1.5 seconds (particularly good for a touch-screen camera) and its continuous shooting rate is a decent 0.8 frames per second.