Sony Cyber-Shot W120

Sony packs a surprising number of features and color choices in its Cyber-shot DSC-W120, a 7-megapixel shooter that teeters on the fence between budget and fashion. It lacks some of the features of the Cyber-shot T- and higher-end W-series cameras, but offers much more than Sony’s budget Cyber-shot S-series. It’s a middle-ground camera that stands on its own without catering strictly to budget-minded shoppers or stylish gadget-hounds.

The attractive, metal W120 is available in black, silver, blue, and pink versions. Curiously, the step-up W130 only comes in silver, black, and pink. The inch-thick camera weighs just 5.4 ounces with battery and Memory Stick Duo card, and slips easily into most pockets. On the backside of the camera, a 2.5-inch LCD leaves room for a small optical viewfinder, a mode dial, and a handful of buttons. While the small, flat controls feel more comfortable than the last generation W90’s buttons, they still seem a bit small for larger thumbs.

The 7-megapixel shooter includes a 32-128mm-equivalent, f/2.8-5.8 lens with Sony’s Super SteadyShot optical image stabilization. The lens offers a slightly longer than usual 4x optical zoom, though slight barrel distortion is present at its widest angle. A 9-point autofocus system helps the camera lock onto subjects, and face detection can automatically adjust focus and exposure to suit the faces in your pictures. Adult and Child Priority face detection modes can differentiate between and focus primarily on children or adults in group photos, and Smile Shutter mode automatically captures photos when subjects smile. Sony’s Photo Music, an in-camera slide show program, lets users show off their photos either on the camera’s 2.5-inch screen or, with an optional video connector, on an HDTV. The slide shows can use a variety of transition effects, and users can upload their own soundtracks to the camera.

Despite its broad feature set, the W120 leaves out many of the onboard retouching and picture editing tools found on most other W- and T-series cameras. Its brother, the W130, comes with several photo filters, such as radial blur, fish-eye lens, and unsharp masking. The W120 can only rotate and resize pictures in the camera. A lot of these in-camera editing features are more flashy than functional, but it would have been nice to include at least a digital red eye removal.

In our lab tests, the W120 performed on par with or slightly worse than the 8-megapixel W130. After a 1.8-second wait from power-on to capturing its first JPEG, the camera could capture a new photo once every 1.3 seconds with the onboard flash turned off. With the flash turned on, that wait more than doubled to 2.7 seconds. The shutter felt quick, lagging just a hair longer than the W130 with our high-contrast target; the W120’s shutter lag measured half a second compared to the W130’s lagged 0.45 second. With our low-contrast target both cameras performed admirably, each lagging just one second. Unfortunately, the W120 didn’t fare well in burst mode, capturing 12 7-megapixel photos in 12 seconds for a rate of one frame per second. The W130 scored double that rate, recording 15 8-megapixel shots in 7.5 seconds.

The W120’s photos look crisp, and colors appear neutral and accurate. Close inspection reveals some image artifacts, but they’re within an acceptable range for a camera of this class. Noise stays low up to ISO 400, and then noticeable grain begins to develop and starts to obscure finer details, such as small text and the textures of objects. Shots taken at ISO 800 look fuzzy but remain quite usable for both online use and small prints. From ISO 1600 to the camera’s maximum sensitivity of ISO 3200, noise obscures or destroys most fine details and the majority of shadow detail is obliterated. While they don’t make good prints, these high-sensitivity shots still might be useful for e-mailing or uploading to the Web under the right circumstances.

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W120 is a fine compact camera. Its quick performance, good picture quality, and surprisingly robust feature set make it a solid choice in the budget category. However, the Cyber-shot DSC-W130 dwarfs it in nearly every way. For about $30 more, you can get a camera with a higher resolution, quicker performance, and many onboard editing tools. If you’re committed to a $200 price tag or just really want a blue camera, the W120 serves its purpose well. If you can spend the extra few dollars, though, make the upgrade to the W130.

Sony Cybershot T300

With its T series, Sony has an unfortunate habit of taking at least one step back for every two steps forward. In early 2007, it released the Cyber-shot DSC-T100, a great little camera with fast performance, a broad feature set, and solid photo quality. A few months later, Sony shipped the T200–also fast with even more features, but photos that simply didn’t look as good as the T100’s. Now Sony presents the Cyber-shot DSC-T300. The T300 is fast, includes even more features than the T200, and ups the resolution from 8 to 10 megapixels. Unfortunately, its photos look even worse than the T200’s.

At a casual glance, the T300 looks almost identical to its predecessor. At just 7/8-inch thick and weighing 6.1 ounces with battery and Memory Stick Duo, it’s slightly thinner and lighter than the T200. Underneath its stylish, slim body and signature sliding lens cover, though, the T300 received some important tweaks for the T200’s faults.

The T300’s zoom rocker rests comfortably on the upper-right corner of the camera, much more accessible than the T200’s tiny, top-mounted zoom nub.

The “Cyber-shot” accent on the left side of the camera’s front slides along with the lens cover; the T200’s accent sat immobile against the camera’s body, and made opening and closing the shutter slightly awkward.

Besides its stylish sliding lens cover (a signature feature on all Cyber-shot T-series cameras), the T300’s display stands out as its most notable feature. You control almost every aspect of the camera via a 3.5-inch touch-screen LCD, leaving just a power button, a playback button, a shutter release, and a zoom rocker as its only physical controls. The screen dominates the entire back panel of the camera, barely leaving half a centimeter around it for the bezel. On the bright side, this huge screen gives you a large, bright view of your pictures and the menus. On the other hand, it leaves almost no room for your thumb to rest while shooting. A large, sturdy lanyard mount on the right side of the camera offers some space, but big thumbs will still tend to brush against the touch screen.

Even if you can shoot without accidentally tapping the screen, you’re still going to have to delve into the camera’s menu system at some point. The menus aren’t just irritating; they’re downright neurotic and take far too long to navigate, requiring constant reassurance with countless taps of “OK.” Change the resolution, hit “OK.” Change the white balance, hit “OK.” Enter the camera settings menu by hitting “OK,” then confirm each setting by hitting “OK” again.

As Sony’s highest-end point-and-shoot, the T300 includes all the latest features. It sports an optically stabilized f/3.5-4.4 33mm-to-165mm-equivalent 5x zoom lens that delivers a surprisingly long reach for a slim camera. Unfortunately, that reach comes at the cost of wide angle and speed; a 28mm, f/2.8 lens would have been preferable, even if it didn’t offer a 5x zoom. The T300 also features several face-detection shooting modes, including Adult and Child Priority, which let the camera identify kids’ or adults’ faces in group photos and adjust focus and exposure accordingly, and Smile Shutter, which delays shooting until the subject smiles.

A suite of onboard photo-editing and retouching tools take full advantage of the huge touch panel and included lanyard-tethered stylus. A rudimentary paint program lets you draw on your pictures, and cropping and resizing tools can trim them to fit 16:9 wide-screen displays, scale down to VGA (640×480) for e-mailing, or simply crop out bits you don’t want to keep. A variety of effects offer even more options, including digital red-eye removal, radial blur, soft focus, and fisheye lens tools that can focus on a single spot in a picture with a tap of the stylus. Finally, the T300 includes a Happy Faces feature that automatically turns frowns upside-down. When you take a portrait and the subject doesn’t smile, Happy Faces distorts the subject’s mouth to give them a smile. The end results range from surprisingly realistic to Jokeresque. All of the T300’s editing tools automatically create copies of pictures you edit; the original shot is preserved, while changes are saved to new files.

After you edit your pictures, you can use the T300’s various slide-show and sorting features to organize and share them with your friends. You can use the touch screen to sort pictures into different folders, and even tag your favorite shots so you can view them separately. A built-in slide-show mode displays your photos with a customizable MP3 soundtrack and a variety of slide transition effects. The camera comes with a composite video cable for displaying pictures on a television, though HDTV owners should consider the optional component video cable if they want to fully take advantage of the feature.

Once you get past the awkward menus and copious options, the camera performs quite fast. In CNET Labs’ tests, the T300 snapped its first shot 1.9 seconds after powering on, and took another picture every 1.7 seconds thereafter. With the onboard flash enabled, that wait increased to 2.2 seconds. The shutter felt responsive, lagging just a hair under half a second in our high-contrast environment and a full second in our low-contrast lighting. In burst mode, the camera delivered a respectable 1.9 frames per second.

Quick performance and dozens of features are great, but in the end cameras have to be judged on the pictures they take. Unfortunately, we found the T300 seriously lacking in that respect. Even at its best, photos generally look soft, with haloing along edges. At its lowest sensitivity, ISO 80, we still see noise in flat colors, like gray. It becomes noticeable across the board at ISO 200, and by ISO 400 starts degrading detail. At ISO 3,200 photos look like they were painted with a worn-out kitchen sponge. Finally, the camera’s lens produced conspicuous vignetting–darkening the corners of shots–at its widest, and displayed distortion at both the wide and telephoto ends of the range.

While the Cyber-shot DSC-T300 offers a great design, loads of features, and fast performance, its pictures simply don’t look match up to its predecessors or to competitors such as the Canon PowerShot SD950 IS. If you can pick up the T200 or T100 however, seriously consider either of them instead of this latest model.

Canon Powershot A590 IS

Canon put substance over style when it designed the PowerShot A590 IS, and in doing so it made a great camera. While the clunky-looking 8-megapixel shooter looks bland when compared with colorful, ultraslim, style-minded cameras, its impressive insides help produce some of the nicest photos you’ll shoot for less than $200.

The chunky, practical design gives the A590 IS a functional and easy-to-handle feel at the expense of aesthetics. A large protrusion houses the camera’s two AA batteries on the right side of the body and also provides a steady grip. The 2.5-inch LCD screen leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder, a convenient sliding mode switch, and several large, responsive buttons. While it won’t slip as easily into a pocket as an ultracompact camera, and won’t elicit any impressed gasps from your friends, the A590 IS simply feels comfortable to use.

As with previous PowerShot A-cameras, Canon built the A590 IS around a large, bright, flexible lens. The 35-to-140mm-equivalent, f/2.6-to-f/5.5 lens offers a slightly longer reach and wider aperture than the 3x, f/2.8 lenses found in most compact cameras. It incorporates Canon’s Optical Image Stabilization system, which shifts lens elements to help reduce image shake. The camera can also accept conversion lenses with an optional adapter that fits over the base of the original lens. Unfortunately, the adapter retails for about $25, and conversion lenses retail for $100 or more, so outfitting your A590 IS with wide and/or telephoto conversion lenses can cost almost as much as the camera itself.

Skilled photographers will appreciate the camera’s myriad controls and options. Like other PowerShot A-series cameras, it offers program, aperture priority, shutter priority, and full-manual exposure control modes. Of course, if you don’t want to use any of those features, you can still shoot in the automatic mode, or with the camera’s several scene presets. Finally, the camera adds a new “Easy” mode, which further simplifies and automates the interface.

Slow shot-to-shot speed hindered the A590 IS’s otherwise very quick performance. After a 1.8-second wait from power-on to first shot, the camera could capture a new picture once every 2.3 seconds with the flash disabled. With the flash turned on, that wait more than doubled to an anguishing 5.2 seconds. Burst mode further disappointed, capturing 9 full-resolution shots in 11.2 seconds for a rate of 0.8 frames per second. On the other hand, its shutter performed admirably, lagging a scant 0.45 seconds with our high-contrast target and an even more impressive 0.7 seconds with our low-contrast target. Whether you shoot in low light or outside on a sunny day, you can expect the camera to grab the shot quickly, and then leave you waiting a few seconds before you can shoot again.

Last year, the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100 wowed us with its remarkably crisp picture quality. Though the A590 IS retails for far less than that camera, it manages to produce photos that are nearly on a par with those from the T100. While the A590 IS’s automatic white balance does a great job for a camera in its price range, it’s not quite as good as the automatic white balance in the T100. The A590 IS does a good job of neutralizing colors shot under incandescent light, but leaves a hint of warmth. It also leaves more of a green cast than we’d like to see on a camera like this when shooting under fluorescent lighting. Its tungsten setting did a wonderful job of neutralizing our very yellow tungsten hot lights. While noise remains extremely low from ISO 80 to 200, we did see some noise even at the camera’s lowest sensitivity setting. Still, at these lower ISOs pictures look very good for a camera of this price, and fine textures such as fabric and fur appear consistently crisp. Noise becomes prominent at ISO 400, though details still come through clearly. Like most compact cameras, the A590 IS produces significant grain at ISO 800 and its maximum of ISO 1,600, covering the picture and damaging details with a fuzzy sheen. Overall, the A590 IS produces very nice images and can even yield usable small prints at ISO 800, which is impressive for a camera of its class.

Whether you’re just looking for an inexpensive, flexible camera or a secondary shooter for when you’re not schlepping around your SLR, the Canon PowerShot A590 IS is a great choice. Its high image quality, broad feature set, and fast shutter help ensure that you’ll get the shots you want, and that they’ll look good. It’s not the prettiest or slimmest camera on the market and it takes far too long to recycle the onboard flash, but this sub-$200 shooter will still generally serve you well. You’d be hard pressed to find better pictures for the price.

How to Avoid Fuzzy Pictures

If you get fuzzy pictures when zooming in from a distance with your digital camera, the fuzziness is probably caused by one of two things:

• One is that you’re moving the camera when taking the shot. Any movement is exaggerated when you’re zoomed in, so try using a tripod or stand very still, take a deep breath, hold it, take the photo and then breathe out.

• The other problem is that you might be using digital zoom, which isn’t a true zoom, and the results are more likely to be fuzzy simply because the camera is enlarging the pixels to make the images bigger, rather than really zooming in on the subject. I always turn off digital zoom, and doing that might help. You won’t be able to zoom in so close, but you might get clearer shots,

As for photographing moving people: Try following them with the camera so you actually move the camera with them. Take the shot as you move and keep moving until it’s all done. That way you should get the person nicely sharp and the background nicely blurred.

Nikon Coolpix 550c

Some things never change. Some other things, such as Nikon’s wireless S-series cameras, change a little bit at a time. Nikon’s new Coolpix S50c is a whole lot like the S7c that the company offered last year. It boasts a 7.2-megapixel CCD imaging sensor, a 3X optical, 38mm-to-114mm-equivalent f/3.3-to-f/4.2 zoom lens, a 3-inch LCD, and houses it all in a cute, curvy-yet-slim casing that’s available in silver or black. Oh yeah, and it can wirelessly upload (via built-in 802.11 b/g) your images to Nikon’s CoolPix Connect 2 Web site and send e-mails to your friends and family so they can retrieve said photos for free. Other than some slight, but welcomed, control changes, the biggest and best difference between this and last year’s model is the addition of optical image stabilization instead of the much-less-effective electronic stabilization found in the S7c.

Never ones to mess with a good thing, Nikon stuck with the same elegant, subtle wave design that most of its ultracompacts have used in recent years. However, compared to last year’s S7c, there are a couple of minor differences in the control layout. Instead of using a tiny lever next to the shutter to control zoom, Nikon has opted for a tiny rocker on the camera back. I like this better, since the placement of the lever on the S7c was more prone to accidental zooming. Moving the zoom control also forced Nikon to redesign the four hard buttons on the camera back, which you’ll now find above and below the click wheel, which provides quick navigation through the camera’s menu system.

If you’re looking for a plethora of exposure controls, you won’t find them here. Like most ultracompacts, the S50c relies on scene modes (15 in this case) to deal with out-of-the-ordinary, or just plain tricky, shooting situations. Exposure compensation lets you tweak the camera’s metering in third-stop increments up to plus or minus 2 EV, but in field tests, the 256-segment matrix metering generally did a good job of determining exposure.

In addition to the scene modes, Nikon includes features to make certain shooting situations easier. Easily accessible by a button on the top-left of the camera, the One Touch Portrait mode sets the camera to recognize faces. In this mode, while you frame the photo, the camera puts yellow boxes around the faces in your photo. At the same time, it chooses one as the main face to use for metering and focus, and puts a bracketed yellow box around that one. The hope is that the camera won’t become confused and focus on something in the background when you’re trying to get a portrait instead. In my field tests, it worked; friends were in focus and their faces were well exposed. In playback mode, the One Touch Portrait button doubles as the D-Lighting button, which tweaks the brightness and contrast of an image in case an exposure doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it to.

Just to the left of that button is the Anti-Shake mode button. In this mode, the camera disables the flash, automatically chooses an ISO of up to ISO 1600 in an attempt to force a fast shutter speed, turns on optical image stabilization, and enables the Best Shot Selector (aka BSS) mode. BSS shoots up to 10 photos in a single burst, using only the first to determine focus and exposure, and then analyzes the results and chooses the one it thinks is best. If you want to use BSS mode without the other Anti-Shake features, you can activate it alone in the main shooting menu.

While Nikon included a year’s worth of T-Mobile access with the S7c last year, you’ve got to pay your own way from the get-go if you want to use the S50c at a T-Mobile hot spot. However, you do still get free storage (50MB) on the CoolPix Connect 2 Web site, which can be used to share your photos with friends and family. If you have access to a private 802.11b/g network, you can use it to upload your photos and send e-mail notifications with links to your uploaded photos. The camera can even store network profiles, complete with TKIP, WEP, or AES security keys.

However, despite our ardent suggestions, Nikon hasn’t seen fit to include a browser in the camera, which would let you use the camera with one of the many free Wi-Fi hot spots cropping up around the world. Since the vast majority of such connections require you to click a simple button to accept their terms of service (usually a legal disclaimer to limit the provider’s liability), you end up with a network error message on the S50c if you try to access such a network. In my opinion, Nikon should really take it a step further to include a browser that would let you enter credit card info, so you can access the Wi-Fi networks offered by most hotels. Want to appeal to affluent business travelers, Nikon? This would definitely help.

To Nikon’s credit, the S50c’s wireless functioned flawlessly when I used it with my wireless router at home. Setup was simple, and fairly quick, on the camera. After I sent my first picture e-mail, I got an e-mail from CoolPix Connect 2 that prompted me to complete my registration at Nikon’s Web site, where I input the camera’s key (found in the wireless portion of the setup menu) and was then ready to go.

In our lab tests, the S50c turned in sluggish results. It took 3.9 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG. Subsequent JPEGs took 2.4 seconds between shots with the flash turned off, and 2.5 seconds between shots with the flash turned on. Shutter lag measured 0.9 second in our high-contrast test, which mimics bright shooting conditions, and 2.1 seconds in our low-contrast test, which mimics dim shooting conditions. In continuous shooting mode, we were able to capture 7.2-megapixel JPEGs at an average of 1.39 frames per second, or VGA-sized JPEGs at an average of 1.68 fps.

Image quality was good, but not outstanding, for an ultracompact. Colors were generally accurate and the camera’s automatic white-balance system did a decent job of neutralizing colors under incandescent lighting, though our test shots retained a very slight yellowish cast. Of course, some people prefer this, since it retains a hint that you weren’t shooting in daylight. The camera’s tungsten and fluorescent settings did a good job with their respective light sources, and the manual white balance turned in the most neutral results of all. Images from the S50c weren’t the sharpest we’ve seen, but they still have plenty of fine details and we were pleased to find only very minor colored fringing.

At the camera’s lowest sensitivity of ISO we saw almost no noise, but at ISO 200 noise crept in slightly, manifesting as tiny white specks, but it was only really viewable on monitors and not in prints. At ISO 400, noise grew and included some larger off-color speckles. While Nikon’s noise reduction algorithms smooth it out some, it still has a minor appearance in some prints. At ISO 800, noise obscures a large amount of finer detail when viewing on monitors and a significant amount of shadow detail is lost, though smaller prints should still be passable.

Overall, the S50c is a very nice ultracompact camera, though its wireless capabilities could be more useful. Since Nikon offers the S50, which is basically the exact same camera without the wireless, you’re probably better off saving some money and opting for that, unless you think you’ll get a really big kick out of uploading images through your home wireless router, or you plan on forking over an extra $4.99 a month for the privilege of using one of T-Mobile’s hot spots.

Six Great Photo Tips

1. Naming photo files: In general, when you use numbers you can automatically sort the files in order, where dates written out won’t sort.
2. Photographing moving people: Try following them with the camera so you actually move the camera with them. Take the shot as you move and keep moving until it’s all done. That way you should get the person nicely sharp and the background nicely blurred.
3. Be wary of deleting images in the camera. Something that looks like it’s a terrible shot in the camera, when opened may have some artistic merit. If you’re interested in the artistic possibilities, I’d wait and cull on the larger computer screen where you can more accurately assess what sort of shot you have.
4. View pictures, don’t save: Every time you save a file as a JPEG format image, you permanently lose some quality. Just opening and viewing it doesn’t do that, but saving will compromise quality.
5. Best size for e-mailing photos: For e-mailing, I suggest 800 x 600 is the best maximum size. For printing, you need a lot more image. I like to resize the image to a resolution of 300 dpi and then adjust the size in inches to the final print size. Your photo software will have a tool for resizing images.
6. Photo backups: When you downsize a photo you’re going to permanently lose that data so consider using CDs or DVDs to back up your photos. When you do that, make a couple of copies to CD or DVD just in case a disk fails. Also, buy good quality disks from a reputable manufacturer.

Canon Releases SD1100

One of the most popular cameras of last year wasn’t a big fancy digital SLR, or a pimped-out superzoom, it was Canon’s somewhat understated Powershot. Its combination of a nice, though not extravagant, feature set, small size, and relatively low price proved quite appealing to camera buyers. This year, with the PowerShot SD1100 IS, Canon has updated the aesthetic design, switched to a slightly different zoom range, and most importantly, added optical image stabilization. Of course, they’ve also raised the resolution to 8 megapixels from last year’s 7.1 megapixels and refined some of the camera’s other features.

Last year’s model evoked the design of the original film Elph with its black circle around the camera’s lens and squared-off edges. This year, Canon brought this model back in line with more recent designs without abandoning its elfin status and is offering it in silver, blue, brown, pink , and gold. The tweaked design is just slightly thicker than last year’s and sports rounded edges and a slightly curved indent on the right-hand side that provides a perfect nook for a middle finger when gripping the camera. As with last year’s model, Canon places all buttons on the right half of the body. A slider lets you switch among still image capture, video recording, and playback. Other than three dedicated buttons for Menu, Display, and Direct Printing, the only other control is the circular four-way rocker with a Function/Set button in the middle.

Canon doesn’t include manual exposure controls in its Digital Elph line, but you will find an ample array of preset scene modes and some features that make automatic shooting simpler. As with a lot of compact cameras, the SD1100 IS includes face detection. This year, Canon has extended this function to let it set not only focus and exposure, but also flash output and white balance, so the camera should be less likely to blow out the details on your friend’s face with the flash and should be better able to keep skin tones neutral in varied light sources. To help combat confusion when setting ISO, the SD1100 IS includes Motion Detection Technology, which raises the ISO setting if there is a moving subject when you have the camera set to High ISO Auto mode. By raising the ISO, the camera can shoot at a faster shutter speed to freeze the action.

While some cameras have been switching to wider-angle lenses, Canon includes a 38-114mm equivalent f/2.8-4.9 3X optical zoom lens in the SD1100 IS in contrast to last year’s 35-105mm lens. The change in focal lengths doesn’t make for much of an effective difference, though we did notice more distortion at the SD1100 IS’s 38mm setting than we did at the SD1000’s 35mm setting. Canon did add optical image stabilization however, which should help if you often shoot stationary objects in low light. Since the lens isn’t all that wide, you might find the optical viewfinder helpful to bring the camera a bit further back when trying to frame a shot, or in situations where you don’t want to have the bright LCD turned on.

Though it has a responsive shutter, the SD1100 IS took longer than its predecessor between shots and its flash took too long to recycle. The camera was quick to start up, taking 1 second from pressing the power button to until it captured its first JPEG. Thereafter, it took 2.1 seconds between JPEGs with the flash turned off, making it more than a half second slower than the SD1000. With the flash turned on, the camera took 3.5 seconds between shots, which is more than a second slower than its predecessor. Shutter lag measured a very impressive 0.4 second in our high-contrast test and an even more impressive 0.7 second in our low-contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. Continuous shooting yielded a none-too-impressive 0.8 frame per second (fps), again a step down from the SD1000’s 1.7 fps.

Image quality from the SD1100 IS is quite nice for a camera of its class. Its automatic white balance does a good, but not perfect, job of neutralizing colors under a variety of light sources. It adds a bit of warmth to incandescent-lit shots and a touch of green to fluorescent, but does a great job in natural daylight. The camera’s tungsten setting did a good job of neutralizing the harsh yellow cast of our tungsten hot lights. While noise isn’t completely nonexistent at ISO 80, you’ll have to look quite closely to find any at this lowest sensitivity or at ISO 100, and both settings offer pleasingly sharp images with plenty of shadow detail. By ISO 200 you’ll start to notice noise, especially in shadows, though there is still plenty of sharpness to the images. At ISO 400, noise still isn’t over the top, and there is a surprising amount of sharpness, though I saw a noticeable roll-off in shadow detail. Things get precipitously worse at ISO 800, though you still might be able to get a decent 4×6-inch print under ideal circumstances. By ISO 1,600, images look as if they’re shot during a hailstorm. I suggest staying below ISO 800 whenever possible.

Given the success of the SD1000, I was surprised that Canon let the camera’s shot-to-shot time slide with the SD1100 IS. They make up for it a bit by adding optical image stabilization and keeping the impressive image quality of its predecessor. Despite my whining, the SD1100 IS is still a very nice camera, and if you’re going to make a trade-off anywhere, I’d rather wait a bit longer between shots than sacrifice image quality or shutter lag. As long as you don’t mind the long flash recycle time, Canon’s SD1100 IS makes a great choice for a relatively inexpensive ultracompact camera. If optical image stabilization doesn’t mean that much to you though, you should probably see if you can find still find the SD1000, since you can get it at a very nice discount if there are still any available.