Last week, I got a new pocket camera to compliment my DSLR and replace my Fuji F20. After much debate over both features and budget, I settled on the Canon Powershot SD1400 IS [newegg.com]. As with any new device, I decided to play before reading the manual and so far, I consider it money well spent.
Since I have a DSLR and a couple of extra lenses, I was not looking for a full-time camera. Instead, I was looking for what I call a pocket camera; a camera that I carry everywhere and use for on-the-spot creative shots or family gatherings. When I want more serious photos, the DSLR and associated gear come out. End of story. Still, deciding which camera to purchase is important because I do still take these and turn them into prints, and I don't mean just 4x6s or 5x7s.
So far, the camera performs great. There are plenty of features I'm not likely to use very often (most people don't use all the features of any point-and-shoot camera) such as most of the program functions. However, there are several things I was looking for specifically and found in this sleek little camera.
First and foremost, general quality is excellent. Even in full-automatic mode the pictures generally turn out very nice - nicer than I've seen in any prior camera. So much so, that I will likely use full-auto mode much more often (which for me might be up to 50% of the time). Other than that, it's full-auto mode and there isn't much more to say.
While full-auto does great, I frequently wish take "natural light" photos. With most cameras, this is a problem unless you're outdoors in bright sunlight. This seems to make easy work of it. I've taken test shots in my home office and living room and even in stores (I find JC Penney a little boring, see above photo). I've been very satisfied with the natural light performance. Where my Fuji would overcompensate in the ISO, the Canon seems to stay comfortably in the 400-800 ISO range and produces very little grain (in Auto ISO mode, it hits two in-between numbers; 500 and 640 ISO). The Fuji would often stray well above 800 ISO (oddly, even with the flash ON) and the photos would suffer for it. The greatest part: this camera doesn't have a dedicated "Natural Light" program mode. Just turn off the flash and shoot.
Getting into even lower light, the Canon has a feature for that, too. The low-light program mode creates a "good" photo in low-light. I use the word "good" because it bumps the quality down to 3.5 MP (roughly equivalent to a 35mm film). I noticed that, in this mode, the ISO jumps up to 1600 or 2000, yet I don't see the tell-tale grain one usually finds in higher-ISO shots. I believe it's using all 14.1 MP available to the sensor and doing a "best match" on the photo, replacing the "grain" pixels with neighboring pixels that better match the surrounding image. The result is a pretty clear 3.5 MP photo, which is perfectly acceptable for many purposes, though you're not going to want to make more than an 8x10 print at that resolution.
There are two other program modes I haven't seen on a camera I've owned before, and I found them intriguing. These are the Color Accent and Color Replace modes. Color Accent allows you to select an accent color (by pointing the camera at the color, which is nice, I was half-expecting a limited palette) and when you take a photo, it's all B&W except for that color. For example, you can choose a red accent color if you're taking a photo of someone in a red coat. The picture will be B&W except for the red coat. Same thing for flowers, etc. I noticed that the colors can be somewhat inaccurate around the edges where you have more shadow or more light which throws it outside the +/- range the camera uses for the chosen color. It's a neat feature, I may play with it, but when I'm serious about an accent color, I'll stick to PhotoShop. The Color Replace mode works much the same way except you choose two colors (original and new) and the photo is not B&W. It simply swaps the two colors in an otherwise normal photograph.
Other camera features are pretty standard. The exposure compensation is a quick-access button so if you're using a tripod you can easily do a -2, 0, +2 bracket manually to create an HDR later. The setting menus come up on the left side and are easy to read and navigate. There is no "super macro" mode, but with regular macro (or auto, which detects macro shots very well) I was able to get around 1" from the subject and it would focus without missing a beat. The timer is a little more advanced than most, allowing you to not only set a 10 second timer, but also to take 3 shots when the timer runs down - handy for automatic group shots.
Finally, the camera offers 720p HD video. To be honest, this is the one feature with which I am least impressed and subsequently am not likely to use except as a last-resort option. The picture comes out a little grainy and you might as well forget zooming. Even though I was using only the 4x optical zoom, the effect was much more like an all-digital zoom, resulting in very blocky, ugly video. If you are really looking for a photo+video camera (I wasn't, really, but I considered it a bonus) then this may not be the best option. I haven't personally tried any others, but I would recommend going to the store and having testing both modes in-hand before making your purchase. This thing may film in 720p, but it sure didn't look it.
The Canon SD1400 is really a great little camera, if not much of a video camera. Anyone looking to take great stills without much thought would do very well to give it full consideration. Even as a hobbyist who enjoys using advanced features, I found this camera plenty sufficient for every day use. It's very, very small and sleek and fits in the pocket quite nicely. I would highly recommend it to photogs and soccer moms alike.
