Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD

Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD Review

I was looking for the best zoom with image-stabilization in the under-0 category and I'm pretty sure I've found it. In addition, I got what seems to be the smartest camera in its class. Unfortunately, the people who designed it were thinking more about getting the images onto the camera than getting the images off. It doesn't mount as a USB mass-storage device and the bundled software is total "poo." It's a good camera, but save yourself a headache and get a card reader if you don't have one already.

I paid about less than Amazon's price for this camera, which put it in the same price range as a typical 3x-zoom pocket Panasonic, Pentax or Kodak camera, but IMHO it's better than any of those and way better than the Olympus cameras I've tried that cost more. Some of those other cameras will be 12-megapixels while this one's a "mere" 10MP, but don't buy into the megapixel myth.

*_Pros:
10x optical zoom for the price of a 3x zoom camera. The image-stabilization makes it a snap to get great pics while zoomed to the max.

Picture quality is very nice. With decent lighting there's little noise, banding or color-shifting, even at the edges of the images where other cameras tend to sneak it in. Indoors, in Auto mode there's some fine noise in the red and green channels that's easily detectable, but about on-par with cameras in this price-range.

The Auto setting gets you shooting high quality pictures in a hurry. About 2 seconds from power-on to the first shot.

If, like me, you love to fiddle, this thing offers lots of manual settings. ISO, WB, manual focus, aperture control, custom exposure time up to 15 seconds... The Manual settings are especially useful for indoor and macro shots.

People complain about the camera eating batteries. The cheap batteries that it came with were depleted before I'd finished reviewing the controls, but with Energizer Titaniums I easily got at least 250 shots -- some with flash -- before the batteries ran down. I haven't tried Lithium yet.

The little battery used just for keeping time. Sometimes I leave my camera shelved for a month or two and with previous cameras I'd have to set the time and date and other presets all over again. This camera: No pain.

Duplicating images and some tweaking including red-eye correction can done be while browsing images in Playback mode instead of at the time of the shot.

The camera can be set to display detailed image data including a histogram when a picture is displayed at the time that it's shot and also later in the Preview mode.

Pop-up flash with fine flash controls.

Uses standard AA batteries. No proprietary charger to deal with.

I honestly don't know that the auto face recognition does anything to improve my picture-taking, but it's fun to play with when you've got lots of people in a shot and the time to fuss around.

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*_Cons:
While the manual says that the camera's memory card will mount on a Mac or PC using the supplied USB cable, I've found that it simply doesn't work and a little Googling confirmed that this is an epic fail for almost all Canon cameras. The camera is detected on the USB bus, but it's never mounted as a mass-storage device. I've got a card reader so it isn't a big deal, but it's annoying. Notably, if you lack a card-reader and if you've got a Mac, Apple's Image Capture software -- bundled with the OS -- detects the camera and lets you copy the images anywhere on your drive quite efficiently. This is in contrast to...

The "Camera Window" software that Canon wants you to use to get images and movies off of the memory card is one of the most stupid inefficient pieces of crud ever to pollute my computer. It has almost no configurable options, shows thumbnails but doesn't allow a user to simply drag and drop images to the Desktop or to a convenient folder and forces the user to import the images into an awful awful awful proprietary image-catalog application. Whoever decided to push this lousy software on us deserves to be tarred and feathered and publicly flogged. I just want the memory card on my camera to mount on my computer so that I can copy my pictures to wherever the heck I want and decide for myself how I want my images cataloged. Almost every digital camera did that 10 years ago. Why is it so hard for modern camera-makers to do this?!!

WB suffers a lot indoors when using the Auto mode without the flash.

The camera's display tends to make images look brighter and more saturated than they actually are. Plan accordingly.

Continuous shooting has a delay of about a second between shots. It should be faster.

When shooting video, the WB and ISO seem to be stuck at whatever setting they are at when the camera starts recording so moving from a bright room to a darker room makes for color-shifts and noise.

Also when shooting video, the optical zoom is stuck at whatever setting you had when you started recording. You can't zoom out from there and zooming in from that point is digital-only and adds noise.

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*_Nit-Picking:
The plastic case makes it seem like this camera is low-end when it just ain't.

The battery compartment can be hard to open. There should be some grooves in the battery-door to help you get the traction to slide the door out to the position where it swings open. I've found a trick to doing it with minimal effort: Move the little button with your fingernail, then keep your fingernail in the slot and push with the edge of your nail towards the side of the camera to slide the battery-door out to the point where it can swing open.

Movies are shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio (640x480, AVI, MJPEG compression with raw 8-bit/11KHz mono audio). They are generally of excellent quality -- good enough to stand in for a camcorder in a pinch -- but modern devices should shoot in 16:9 instead of 4:3. Oddly, VLC reports encoding errors in the movie files, but QuickTime 7 has no problem with them.

It's not really big or heavy, but this is not a camera that can easily fit in a pants-pocket. It does fit in the inside pocket on some of my coats. I actually went out and got a little camera case with a belt-loop and shoulder-strap for mine so I don't have to worry about it dangling from my wrist when I'm not using it.

The big white wrist strap that mine came with is ugly. I replaced it with a svelte gray strap from another camera.

The PhotoStitch software that it comes with crashes instantly under Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. I didn't buy it for the cheezy software, but if you want to make panaramas be warned.

The images are saved at 180dpi. I've noticed this with other Canon cameras. I can see a rationale for 72 dpi. I can see 96 or 244 or 300dpi. Why 180dpi? I know that it's arbitrary and largely meaningless, but that number is just weird.

I wish this camera would save pictures in LZW TIFF or RAW format. I hate JPEG.

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Okay, so you've read this far and you see lots of criticisms. I still recommend this camera. It takes good pictures, it's got a great zoom with some of the best image-stabilization I've seen and the interface is suitable for both the neophyte and the advanced amateur user. It's a sweet camera and the price is fantastic for what you get. If you want better, you're going to end up paying a lot more.