Canon has produced a variety of elegant and small cameras
for a number of years: the Digital Elph series, as it is known
in North America, more commonly called Digital IXUS cameras
elsewhere in the world. With the release of the SD300/IXUS
40, a camera with a thin and elegant metal body, a large 2-inch
LCD monitor, and a 3X zoom coupled with a 4 megapixel resolution,
Canon takes their high-quality, super-compact digital Elph/IXUS
series another step forward.
Although it folds away into a space less than an inch in
depth when the camera is powered off, the lens of the SD300
yields images that are fully comparable to those of other Canon
cameras: photos which are sharp, and well contrasted.
Barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom is not noticeable even
when the lens is close to the subject. While the rest of the zoom's range,
all the way to the maximum telephoto setting, is devoid of any distortion.
This said, the wide angle end of
the zoom can also reveal a fairly strong chromatic aberration
if the conditions are just right. Given a dark subject against
a glary background, the photos will show a strong purple line
along a dark edge.
The SD300 has a starting sensitivity of 50 ISO, a level that precludes
noise interfering with the image. Moreover, the SD300 itself does not seem
to be overly prone to noise, and photos captured at 100 and even 200 ISO
are effectively noise-free. At 400 ISO, noise is more noticeable, but normally
with daylight shots never reaches the level at which it ruins the image,
making it useful when a high shutter speed is absolutely critical to either
freeze fast moving action, or prevent camera shake.
Contrasts are also well-handled
by the metering. The default metering pattern of the SD300 is
the Evaluative metering, a system that calculates the exposure
based on discrete measurements made at a number of points in
the frame, which are then combined to arrive at overall settings
for the shot.
While the system is reliable in the vast majority of situations, occasionally
a better exposure can be had using the centre-weighted metering pattern
which, by design, pays more attention to the centre of the frame, which
is usually where the focus point is located.
The availability of all three metering patterns (evaluative,
centre-weighted and spot) on the SD300 is one of its strengths
as few ultra-compact cameras offer that flexibility.
But, as with most of its small cameras,
Canon limits the image quality of the SD300 to one of three levels
of JPEG compression, a common practice. While the Superfine image
quality — the image quality level that sustains the least
amount of compression — generates photos that are flawless
and which never show compression artefacts, the software included
with the SD300 supports Canon RAW image format, and so should
this camera. In our view it is always regrettable when a camera
is unable to save images in a non-lossy format, be it TIFF or
simply as a RAW file.
Even if the option is seldom used,
it should always be available, and not always relegated to more "complex" cameras,
implying that the use of the format is reserved for more "advanced" users.
In the beginning,
the high cost of memory was one of the motivating factors for
the use of the JPEG format, as it was able to store more images
into a tight memory space than other formats could. However,
in the intervening years, memory costs have dropped — particularly
SD memory cards, as their popularity has made them one of the
most affordable — and the incentive for excluding any other
format that require more space is no longer valid.
Although very compact, the SD300 has qualities that are more
commonly associated with significantly bulkier cameras. It
produces large high-definition images which exhibit excellent
colour rendition and very good sharpness.
In addition, the shooting modes it offers are effective, be they the Auto or Scene modes,
or even the Manual mode that allows it to capture night photos,
usually in the domain of significantly more elaborate cameras.
In our opinion, the SD300 should fulfill the wishes of many users.
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