I just wrote a review of the Canon PowerShot SD1000 7.1MP on Amazon.com. I'm quite unhappy with the camera, and want to get this info out. Here's the Reviews page at Amazon: Reviews for Canon PowerShot SD1000 7.1MP Digital Elph Camera And here is my review: I recently bought this camera as a replacement for an older 2.1mp Canon PowerShot S100. I own a great digital SLR, but my wife and I like to have a simple point shoot for short trips, easy carrying, etc. My older Canon was fine, this new SD1000 is not. I'm going to give it another few days (max), but I'm quite close to returning it. Why? The *one thing* this camera is supposed to do well is take photos in automatic mode. I don't want to mess with camera settings - for that, I take my SLR and fiddle to my heart's content. With a point shoot, you're supposed to do just that: point and shoot. The basic problem I've observed (after ~500 photos) is the auto-focus is *terrible*. I tried different lighting scenarios: indoor (flash), indoor (no flash), outdoor (daylight flash), outdoor (daylight, no flash). The results were the same: approximately half of the photos turned out poorly, and almost always it was due to the autofocus. For example, I took a photo of a subject positioned directly in front of the camera, directly in the middle of the viewfinder, about 3 feet away. The subject took up approximately 40% of the view, and again, was positioned directly in front of the camera. Instead of doing what you think autofocus would do, the camera somehow decided to focus on the background scene, completely blurring the foreground. If I checked the photo on the camera, it looked fine but that's only because you cannot perceive focus problems on a 2" lcd screen. Once I transferred the photo to my computer, it was immediately evident that the focus was completely wrong and the photo was unusable. This autofocus blurring happened repeatedly, in varying light conditions, and is flat out terrible. I still have my Canon S100, and despite being an older, slower, and much lower resolution camera (2.1 vs. 7.1 megapixels), I'm tempted to keep using it instead. |
