Canon PowerShot SX100 IS

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Features

To give Canon credit, the SX100 retains many of the controls found in the S3 and S5; manual controls tend to fall by the wayside in this camera class. There's still a full complement of manual and semimanual exposure modes, flash and exposure compensation, and three-metering modes. There's also the de rigueur handful of scene modes, plus a decent face detection mode that lets you scroll through found faces to select one. It still takes longer to use than simply picking a face and focusing on it.

For more details on the D300's design, click on the images.

You do forgo an electronic viewfinder, support for add-on lenses, and a hot shoe with the SX100, though we doubt many potential users would really miss any of them. More irritating is the downfeatured movie capture mode. It does VGA, 30fps movies, but optical zoom doesn't work while shooting them, and the nice separated stereo mics of the S3 and S5 have been replaced with mono sound.

Performance

While the SX100 gets decent marks overall for speed, it does have some borderline performance issues that earned it some ratings demerits. It wakes and shoots in a reasonable 2 seconds. Its shutter lag for high- and low-contrast scenes--0.5 second and 1.7 seconds, respectively--are typical for this class, as is its 1.7-second typical shot-to-shot time.

For more details on the SX100's image quality, click on the image.

However, shot-to-shot time jumps to 4.3 seconds once you enable the flash, a seriously slow figure we haven't seen for several years. And burst shooting runs a mere 0.8 frame per second, which barely exceeds the single-shot shooting speed. Finally, the LCD is good, but not terrific, and not always easy to see in bright sunlight.

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