Canon PowerShot SD950

by John
(Santa Monica, CA)

This Camera is as good as I expected it to be (from reading all of the good reviews)! Great build, great quality, easy to use, and unbelievable pictures! -I guess the best part of this camera is that it has a separate view finder, so you don't have to use the LCD screen and battery. It's nice to have in bright light when the LCD screen is hard to see. The image in the viewfinder is very small, but better than nothing.

The movies are as good as most P&S cameras, they are good quality, but fairly low resolution. Some new manufacturers are using DviX and they are really nice. (both use AVI file types) -It is very nice that the lens retracts while you're in the mode for viewing your photos, saving battery power. Battery only lasts a few days with minimal use, but I think it's about standard for these higher resolution cameras.

I like it's wrist strap which is wound like a rope instead of flat, so it holds up better and doesn't shred apart, and it has a plastic slide to tighten it around your wrist, a feature I really like (chasing a one year old around with the camera).

The camera comes on really fast. It takes good quality pictures and the color is good. As good an any compact I've used.

Cons - The simple options (things you can get to with buttons without having to go into the menu options) are limited: flash, even on manual mode, are limited: on off and auto, no soft focus, if you want red eye you have to go into the menu, etc; shot modes, there is macro but no super macro. My Older Pentax, for example, has about 2 to 3 times the number of options.

The body is a little heavier and larger than many other manufacturers. LCD screen is really small. The compact point and shoot with the large LCD is really nice for showing off photos in the photo view mode.

When you zoom, everything is out of focus until you depress the button to take the photo, so you don't have any idea what you're going to get. You can wait for the image to focus before depressing all the way, but it can take a long time.

It does not have a non compressed file format, like RAW or TIFF so you really need to be careful to save your original, unedited shots. Even rotating them can reduce quality in the compressed jpg format.

It is a little higher priced than some of the other cameras in it's category. The Pentax A40 12MP is $100 less and there are several Kodak 12MP cameras for under $200. Because of the high resolution, I'd suggest a really fast SD card because the standard 2mb read/write time is WAY too slow. The difference is waiting several seconds for a photo to write vs having it write immediately.

All in all, it's a good camera, it got high ratings in the reviews (about 7/10)and I have canon cameras that are nearly a decade old that still work, so I'm guessing this will hold up well too.