Canon PowerShot SX150 IS review: Canon PowerShot SX150 IS

Editors' note: Several of the design, features, and shooting options are identical between the Canon PowerShot SX150 IS and the PowerShot SX130 IS we reviewed, so readers of the earlier review may experience some deja vu when reading the same sections below.

6.6

Canon PowerShot SX150 IS

$94 at Amazon

The Good

The <b>Canon PowerShot SX150 IS</b> offers very good photo quality and features for its class, including semimanual and manual shooting modes, and it uses AA-size batteries.

The Bad

The SX150 IS' shooting performance is miserable, as is its battery life, especially using alkaline batteries.

The Bottom Line

If a long lens, AA batteries, and some creative control over your photos are what you're after, the Canon PowerShot SX150 IS is a good choice. That is, as long as you don't mind it being painfully slow.

Canon does little with the PowerShot SX150 IS to entice owners of its predecessor, the SX130 IS, to trade it in for the refresh. I regularly recommended the SX130 IS due to its use of AA batteries for power, its full manual to full auto shooting modes, and its large comfortable design that still squeezes into a pocket. The SX150 IS doesn't lose any of those features.

In fact, it seems to have all the same shooting modes (plus a Discreet mode that shuts off all noises and lights), the same 28mm wide-angle lens with 12x zoom, and the same 3-inch LCD. What's new is an Intelligent IS system that figures out what you're shooting and adjusts the image stabilization accordingly; a one-touch movie record button; and a resolution bump from 12 to 14 megapixels.

No good really comes from the increased resolution; it seems you just get more image noise. That said, it still takes very good photos. Like most compact cameras in its class, the SX150 is at its best below ISO 200. At ISO 400 there's a noticeable increase in noise and softness from noise reduction. Photos at higher ISOs are usable for smaller prints and the Web as long as you don't enlarge and heavily crop them. The increased noise at ISO 1600 does cause some faint yellow blotching, though.

Sample photos:
Canon PowerShot SX150 IS

Colors produced by the SX130 are generally excellent--bright, vivid, and fairly accurate in our lab tests. They lose some saturation at ISO 800 and above, but not nearly as much as I've seen from competing cameras. Exposure and white balance are very good. (Read more about photo quality in the sample photo slideshow.)

For video quality, the SX130 is on par with an HD pocket video camera or smartphone. It's not stellar and won't replace a full-size camcorder, but video is certainly good enough for Web use or casual viewing on an HDTV. You do get use of the optical zoom while recording and the lens movement is very quiet so it barely gets picked up by the stereo mic. You will hear it in quieter scenes, though.

The SX150 offers a wide variety of shooting options, giving you plenty to experiment with. Among the many modes are shutter-priority, aperture-priority, and manual options. Available apertures are f3.4, f4.0, f4.5, f5.0, f5.6, f6.3, f7.1, and f8.0. Availability is dependent on zoom position, though you do get the full range at the wide end. Shutter speeds go from 15 seconds down to 1/2,500 second, which is a better range than most cameras in this class offer.

There are also several photo effect options with presets for subject and skin tone color as well as individual adjustments for contrast, sharpness, saturation, red, green, blue, and skin tone. If that's not enough, Canon also includes its Color Swap (for example, change all blue to yellow) and Color Accent (you can pick one highlight color and make everything else monochrome) features. These are available for photos and movies, too.

For those who are addicted to the photo filters from a favorite smartphone app, Canon includes several of its high-quality Creative Filters: Fish-eye Effect, Miniature Effect, Toy Camera Effect, Monochrome, Super Vivid, and Poster Effect.

Plenty of shooting options on the SX150 IS make it a good choice for budding photographers.

On the dial you'll also find Canon's reliable Smart Auto, which analyzes your subject and automatically selects an appropriate scene setting from 32 specially defined settings; an Easy mode for fully automatic shooting with no access to menus whatsoever; some standard scene modes like Portrait, Landscape, and Fireworks; the aforementioned Discreet mode that shuts off all noise and lights while shooting; and a Movie mode for capturing clips at resolutions up to 720p HD.

Shooting performance is very slow, which sadly is average for cameras that use AA batteries. From off to first shot takes about 2 seconds. The shot-to-shot times averaged 3 seconds without the flash while using the flash more than doubled that wait time. Shutter lag--the time from when the shutter release is pressed to when the image is captured--is a minimum of 0.5 second in good lighting. It jumps to 0.8 second in low light, but felt longer. There are two main continuous shooting options: one with autofocus on every shot and one that sets focus and exposure with the first shot. The latter is faster, capturing at about 1 frame per second. The continuous option with AF slows down to about 0.6fps. Add in the shutter lag for the first shot and you'll have to be pretty good at anticipating action to get the shot you want. Basically, don't buy this if you're regularly going to be shooting active children, pets, or sporting events.

The SX150's controls are big and the camera's size makes it comfortable to hold and use.

The SX150's design changes only slightly from earlier versions. It's still bulky and heavy, especially in comparison with competing compact megazooms. Part of the reason for its heft and dimensions is it uses two AA-size batteries for power while other manufacturers have moved to rechargeable packs. Battery life is very short if you use alkaline batteries, and even with rechargeable NiMH batteries it isn't particularly great.

The positive thing about it being larger is that it's comfortable to hold and use. The controls on the back are pretty much the same as those on the SX130 IS. The face detection button is gone and in its place is a one-touch movie record button in addition to display, menu, and exposure compensation buttons above and below the navigational scroll wheel to the right of the 3-inch LCD. The screen gets adequately bright, though some may still find it difficult to see in direct sunlight. The navigational wheel surrounds a Func./Set button and has top, bottom, left, and right pressure points for ISO sensitivity, focus (manual, normal, and macro), flash, and timer. The wheel is responsive with tactile stops to it, so you will not easily overshoot what you're trying to select. Operation is overall easy to pick up, but even seasoned Canon users will want to examine the full manual included on the software disc bundled with the camera.

The batteries and memory card slot are in a compartment accessed through the bottom of the camera, secured by a locking door. That's good considering there's nothing holding the batteries in place. On the right side of the body under a small door are a USB/AV port for connecting to a computer or external display and a DC input if you want to power the camera with an optional adapter.

Conclusion
The Canon PowerShot SX150 IS is a bit of a disappearing breed: a compact megazoom that uses AA-size batteries and has semimanual and manual shooting modes. It's fairly affordable, too, and does get you very good photo quality. Its shooting performance is miserable, though, so I'd only recommend it for patient photographers shooting landscapes and similarly stationary subjects.

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