What would you do with a camera that failed to live up to your expectations? Try returning it? Sell it on Ebay? Drop if off the Golden Gate Bridge? How about, get the facts you need to make the right buying decision in the first place. Sounds good to me. The Canon PowerShot SD800IS Digital Elph is one of the best selling point and shoot cameras available. But, is it the right camera for you? I'm going to skip all the strong selling features of the SD8000IS Elph, and go straight to what I think are the problems . . . and let you decide.
Firstly, lets start with face recognition focusing. The SD800IS as well as a number of Canons are supposed to recognize peoples faces, and focus on the faces for the best picture. It's a great idea in theory, but not so good in practice with this PowerShot. When using the face recognition mode, items around, behind, and near the faces in the photographs are in focus, but quite often the face is not. Face recognition is an idea whose time has come, but Canon needs to do a little more work to get it right.
Chromatic aberration has been a problem in a number of the Canon point and shoots, including the predecessor to the SD800IS, the SD700. Canon obviously doesn't see it as a problem, since it's still visible in the SD800IS. Sometimes called "color fringing", chromatic aberration is a cameras inability to focus two or more different colors on the same focal plane. Mostly, it shows up on wide angle photographs, and can look like a fringe of color around an object that shouldn't be there.
Image noise with this PowerShot is a problem with any photos taken at ISO 400 or higher. If you really want to push it, you could take pictures at ISO 800, as long as you don't plan on developing any pictures greater than 4x6 or 5x7. Using after the fact software to reduce image noise is a possibility, if you don't mind the loss of crispness in your images due to the software's softening algorithms.
It's not a completely damning list of problems for the SD800IS, but things you should be aware of. Things that are better to know up front before buying. Here's just a few more problems to consider.
- no freedom to tinker with the exposure
- red eye artifacts appears quite frequently
- short battery life
- MPEG support for movies has been excluded
- luminance histogram is restricted to playback mode only
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