electronics Canon PowerShot SD600 - The ‘No-Nonsense’ Camera opinions and reviews

Canon PowerShot SD600 - The ‘No-Nonsense’ Camera

The PowerShot SD600 from Canon offers everything you’d expect from an efficient ultra-compact digital camera: fast start-up, simple yet functional controls, responsive shooting, noiseless images even in high-speed and low light conditions, warm and saturated colors and sharp details, all adding up to great picture quality across all settings. In other words, another Canon product that delivers what it promises.

This is one digital camera that sits comfortably, unassumingly, in your shirt pocket; but when it’s fished out to capture important moments, it proves its worth. This camera offers superior video capture ability, 16MB – SD memory card, an optical viewfinder, a standard f/2.8 to f/4.9, 3 x zoom lens, a 2.5in LCD, VGA movie mode with a QVGA 60 frames per second setting and a good number of scene presets. The 60fps setting is ideal for reviewing your videos in slow motion. There are many image parameters that allow you to adjust levels of sharpness, contrast, saturation, skin tone, red, blue and green, resulting in pictures (JPEG format) or videos turning out as best as you could manage. It also saves you the bother of using Photoshop for later correcting or enhancing the stills.

The control system is designed to make anybody find it simple to use. The power button, the shutter release and zoom rocker all sit on the top of the camera. Other control buttons are at the back offering instant access to ISO, flash, shutter settings, macro and burst. Control knobs include a mode slider, display, menu and print buttons. Set the controls on Auto, go about shooting and you will agree that this is the best ‘point-&-shoot’ camera currently in the market.

The optical viewfinder comes in handy while shooting outdoors when it is bright and sunny because at such times the images in the LCD seem swamped in light. The photo quality even in speeds as high as ISO 800 is superior compared to pictures taken at ISO 400 on other digital cameras, though not entirely noiseless. At ISO 200, the shots are as good as those taken on ISO 100. It’s only at ISO 400 and above that the images start to show some noise. This feature makes the SD600 best suited for shooting indoors, in situations where you may dispense with the flash and shoot with available light. A colleague used this camera, without a flash, inside an art gallery and the results were good enough to publish. In Auto setting, the white-balance and exposure are also most satisfactory.

On the downside, there are a few minor problems. A common complaint that skilled photographers have about digital cameras – fringing, is surprisingly minimal in the SD600. Objects that are seen against a bright light do not show ugly fringes in the photos. Lens problems, such as vignetting, pincushioning and other distortions are negligible and to be expected from any compact digital. About the only limitation I found irksome in this combination is the 16MB memory card which cannot hold more than a dozen photos. You’d have to buy additional memory. Barring these few shortcomings, I can safely say that the SD600 is not likely to disappoint even the most demanding of users.