Choosing the right Canon ultracompact camera

Joshua Goldman, Senior Editor April 14, 2010

With street prices ranging from about $150 to $400 for Canon ultracompacts, there's not a lot of room for price differentiation, unless you're really pinching pennies. For the most part, they're all of equal quality, with extremely similar feature sets. One big feature for a lot of people is slowly disappearing from the Digital Elphs: an optical viewfinder. The SD1200 IS and SD780 IS are the only models still available with one and they're 2009 models, so you'd better grab one quick before they're gone.

So if you've set your heart on one of these other sleek little snapshooters, how do you choose among them? Let a salesperson steer you toward the one that happens to be in stock? Perish the thought! Make your own decisions. Here are some guidelines that should help--we hope.

• If you want the cheapest model, your choice is the older SD1200 IS while its still available. Once it's gone, its update, the SD1300 IS, will take this spot.
• For a touch screen, there's the SD980 IS and the SD3500 IS. The latter has a large 3.5-inch screen that's better if you do a lot of photo viewing with friends and family. The SD980 IS is like a touch-screen camera with training wheels; it can be operated by touch or with its physical controls.
• If you want the smallest model, opt for the SD780 IS, SD940 IS, or its update the SD1400 IS. They're all approximately the same size, though the SD780 is technically the smallest.
• If you want a wide-angle lens, the SD3500 IS and SD980 IS have ultrawide 24mm-equivalent lenses, and the SD960 IS (sorry, no room in the table), SD940 IS, SD1400 IS, and SD1300 IS offer 28-112mm-equivalent lenses.
• For the fastest, buy any of them. Though Canon has offered faster models in the past, none of them is widely available anymore, and all of the current models perform about the same.
• For the most feature-packed model, which includes a 24mm-equivalent lens with a 5x zoom, 3.5-inch touch LCD, HD movie capture, and HDMI output, buy the SD3500 IS.
• The best overall buy is the SD940 IS for its combination of size, style, and performance. Since its older, the price is very good, too.

We have no pick for best image quality. The current generation produces photos that are all pretty good, but relatively undifferentiable from each other and, for the most part, as flawed as the competition's.

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