Canon PowerShot SD700 IS

Reviewed June 2006

Image Quality

As a new arrival in the Digital Elph/IXUS series, it would have been reasonable to expect the SD700 (IXUS 800 in Europe) to offer a higher resolution than the model it replaces. Instead, the SD700 offers a 6-megapixel resolution, a 4X zoom, and a feature that will likely garner it a lot of attention: an optical stabilizer.

Optical stabilizers are systems that are becoming more common with cameras that have long zooms, and which tend to be a bit bulkier — such as the PowerShot S3 IS — but which up to now were rarely used for compact cameras.

With the SD700, the stabilizer is even more valuable since the lens, at the maximum telephoto setting, has an aperture of f5.5 — a noticeably smaller aperture than the f2.8 available at the wide-angle end — which could increase the likelihood of camera-shake.

The stabilizer allows the use of slower shutter speed, which would otherwise require the use of a tripod, or some other means of stabilizing the camera, to avoid camera-shake which causes a blurred image.

Stabilizers, which often work by stabilizing the lens at the focal point, commonly offer the possibility of continuous stabilization, stabilizing both the image on the LCD monitor and in turn the image at the time of capture, or the less power hungry alternative of stabilization for the shot itself, only at the time the image is captured. To this, the SD700 IS adds a third mode: Panning. The panning mode functions by stabilizing unintentional vertical — up/down — movements but not horizontal ones, making it much easier to capture photos of subjects moving past the camera, such as would be the case with a race.

The quality of the 4X zoom lens of the SD700 IS is also worth noting at this point. Barrel distortion is negligible at the wide-angle end, and pincushion distortion is non-existent at the telephoto end. Moreover, there is no visible chromatic aberration throughout the focal length range of the lens, and images are sharp from corner to corner and edge to edge.

The Auto white balance is able to adapt to different light sources yielding colours that are excellent, well saturated and vibrant.

Similarly, the default metering, the Evaluative pattern, is very reliable and exposures usually show a good balance between highlights and shadows, making it rare to have to resort to one of the other two alternate metering systems.

Noise does make an appearance at the 200 and 400 ISO levels, but it is relatively limited, and images captured at these sensitivities are normally very useable, as noise does not lower their quality significantly. Beyond 400 ISO however, at 800 ISO, noise is easily detectable and lowers the image quality noticeably.

The SD700 IS is also equipped with two other sensitivity settings: Auto ISO, and High ISO, which allow the camera to adjust sensitivity automatically either in the low range (80-400 ISO), or the high range.

While images captured using the Auto ISO setting are never overtly noisy, implying that the camera tends to stick to lower sensitivities, those captured using the High ISO setting can turn out to be quite noisy, and the setting should be used with caution.

Regrettably, when either Auto ISO, or High ISO are used, the camera does not record the precise ISO value it selects, making it difficult to ascertain the range in effect.

The image quality of the PowerShot SD700 IS is nothing short of excellent. Three levels of JPEG compression are available to record images, and the level that applies the least compression, and therefore guarantees the highest image quality, is the Superfine setting. Set to this compression level, the SD700 IS yields images that show no loss of detail, and subtle colours can be detected in both sky and foliage. Moreover, the Fine image quality, a compression level that yields file sizes that are half of those in the Superfine mode, offers an image quality that is often hard to differentiate from the Superfine level.

Indeed, the quality of the images that the SD700 IS yields at the Fine compression level, is often comparable to what many other cameras yield at their highest JPEG image quality setting.

Still, in one area the SD700 IS could stand some improvement: the built-in flash is a bit underpowered, and to obtain a bright image with modestly distant subjects, exposure compensation, or an increase in sensitivity are often required.

The PowerShot SD700 IS is an excellent addition to the Digital Elph/IXUS line. The addition of a stabilizer eliminates the drawback of a limited aperture at the telephoto end, and makes this model even more competent than previous cameras in this series. In other words, the SD700 IS is definitely a step up.