Digital Trends

The SD1000 is one of the newest editions of the ELPH series that celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. The film-based original broke the design mold with its classic “box and circle” styling. Now, the SD1000 Digital ELPH has returned to these retro roots on the outside, but inside, it’s obviously a completely different breed.

This is a 7.1-megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom and is the replacement for the popular SD600. It is extremely compact and can be taken with you almost anywhere — which is terrific for spur-of-the-moment snapshots. It features Canon’s newest DIGIC III processor that not only makes this a very responsive digicam (up to 1.7 fps), but also enables Face Detection Auto Focus and Exposure (AF/AE). It operates like many other FD systems; it automatically searches for human faces and compensates for them so you end up with nice photos. At least, that’s the plan.

For some strange reason, the SD1000 — although it has the highest model number — is not the best ELPH; look to the $499 10MP SD900 for that honor. After scratching our heads a bit over that one, it was time to put the “cheap” SD1000 through its paces.