The arrival of the Powershot
SD500/IXUS 700 moves Canon's Digital Elph/IXUS line into the
7-megapixel arena, and gives it the ability to capture images
that can be output at a very large size.
The SD500 is well-designed and simple to use. For beginners
it offers 9 Scene modes and for the more adventurous it provides
a Manual mode that makes it possible to experiment with a
variety of parameters such as long exposure, white balance
and sensitivity.
Regrettably however, while the SD500's
Manual mode provides partial control over the shutter speed,
it provides no control over the aperture. This means that the
user has no possibility of increasing or decreasing the depth
of field, a function that is very useful when capturing macros
and with some types of long exposures, and which is generally
considered to be an intrinsic part of a "Manual" mode.
Nevertheless, the SD500 offers other controls. For instance, not only does
the camera include AE (Auto Exposure) Lock, it also offers
Flash Exposure (FE) lock, a very unusual feature for a compact
camera such as this.
The SD500's 3X zoom lens offers a focal length range that
has become the de-facto standard on most 3X compact cameras,
a range which when converted to its 35mm equivalent starts
at a modest 37mm and extends to 111 mm.
This range is well-suited to the
standard photographic needs, as it handles both scenery and
group-type photos at the wide end, and travel or portrait-type
images at the telephoto end.
Photos captured over the
entire focal length ranges reveal a solid performance overall,
but also that focus is at its softest at the widest angle.
Distortion, on the other hand, is minimal at both ends of
the range — pincushion is negligible at the telephoto
end and barrelling is never obvious at the wide end —
and moreover, images are normally free of any chromatic aberration.
Similarly, although sharpness is
a bit softer at the wide end, images show that it is even across
the field of view captured by the lens.
All in all, the SD500 delivers
great images without much effort on the part of the user.
Photos have bright colours but the colours are not over-saturated
and therefore remain faithful to reality.
That exposures turn out so well and so easily is in part
due to the default metering system of the SD500, an evaluative
metering pattern that segments the frame to meter it, and
combines these readings to produce a set of exposure parameters
that takes all areas into account.
The SD500 is also equipped with
two other patterns, Centre-weighted and Spot, useful when
the subject of the image is lit quite differently from the
rest of the frame, or when it is backlit.
With a CCD sensitivity range that covers from 50 to 400 ISO,
the SD500 falls well within the standards of compact digital
cameras.
Aperture: f13, shutter speed: 1/125 sec., 50 ISO.
But, the fact that images
can be safely captured from 50 to 200 ISO, and that at 200
ISO the image quality remains generally unaffected by noise
is not all that common. Indeed, only at 400 ISO does noise
become detectable, and even then only in shadow areas or uniformly
coloured areas.
This comparatively low sensitivity to noise is most beneficial
when shooting with flash as it allows increasing the camera's
ISO which in turn increases the effective range of the flash.
All images captured with the
SD500 are stored in JPEG format. Set to the Superfine image
quality, photos are perfect and show no visible loss of detail
or colour, which means that the absence of an uncompressed
format should not be a problem for anyone.
In our opinion, the SD500
only has very minor drawbacks: for one, it does not have a
fully manual mode that gives control over the aperture, a
useful feature as it provides some control over the depth
of field of an image; and for another the monitor omits to
indicate the shutter speed and aperture the camera has selected
Overall though, the PowerShot SD500 is an good mix of some
of the best features of current Canon digital cameras, including
ease of use, great image quality, and high resolution.
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