Digital Trends

Canon PowerShot SD850 IS

August 30th, 2007 | by David Elrich

Testing and Use

The Canon PowerShot SD850 IS is good to go in less than two seconds, once you can stab the poorly placed on/off button. The camera has a very basic but intuitive menu system—you won’t see any fancy images or written descriptions explaining the settings; that’s what the owner’s manual is for. This camera is really targeted to the snapshooter and most don’t go beyond Auto so this is ruminating about a problem that doesn’t even exist so forgive me for rambling on.

In my typical fashion I started in Auto, moved to the scene modes and the few manual options available. In Auto, the camera is fun to use. This summer I’ve attended a number of parties, indoors and out, and took dozens of snaps of smiling faces. The SD850 IS has Face Detection, as do so many other cameras. With it, the camera adjusts exposure and focus when it identifies a human face or a group of people. This is a terrific feature that’s implemented well for this target user—or anyone else who wants nice photos of their friends and family.

Going beyond smiling faces I added many landscapes as well as indoor shots to the 4-gig card—I didn’t even come close to filling it halfway! Before getting to photo quality I want to talk about overall response. This is a point-and-shoot 8-megapixel camera so if you’re looking to shoot sports or running kids, this digicam may not be the right one for you. Its top speed is 1.3 frames per second without the flash. Using the flash, you definitely have to wait several seconds for the camera to recharge. This isn’t a big deal if you’re shooting portraits or landscapes but action sequences aren’t this digicam’s strong suit. If you need the speed, definitely think D-SLR.

After downloading images it was time to make some 8.5x11 full bleed prints. For the most part the prints were quite good although there were a few misfires (just a few) when the camera didn’t focus properly during indoor party scenes. The vast majority were spot on and there was surprisingly little red-eye given the many faces I shot—obviously Canon’s version of Face Detection is among the best available. As for outdoor images, I didn’t have a complaint—other than speed which I discussed. This camera is for taking one shot at a time with a slight breather in between. For example, it couldn’t capture my cat walking through the grass but he looked like a Friskies poster kitty when at rest. Photos taken indoors were high-quality as well except when I pushed the ISO to 800; it’s the rare point-and-shoot camera other than a few Fujifilms that handle digital noise well at those nose-bleed levels. Colors were very accurate, even strong reds with very little loss of detail. I was very happy with my prints—and they were straight out of the camera with no tweaking whatsoever.

Image Courtesy of Canon