Choosing the right Canon ultracompact camera

Lori Grunin, Senior Editor October 16, 2009

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. Canon seems to have finally officially dropped the PowerShot SD430 , which is more than three years old now, leaving Canon without a model with Wi-Fi support. 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 SD1200 IS. Though you may see some lower prices for last year's SD1100, be careful--many of them are for refurbished models.
• For a touch screen, your only choice is the SD980 IS.
• If you want the smallest model, opt for the SD780 IS. It's also the smallest model with an optical viewfinder.
• If you want a wide-angle lens, the SD960 IS (sorry, no room in the table) and SD940 IS offer 28-112mm-equivalent lenses plus HD movie capture.
• For the fastest, buy the SD970 IS. Though Canon has offered faster models in the past, none of them are widely available anymore, leaving the SD970 in front. Its one speed flaw is slow flash shot-to-shot time.
• For the most feature-packed model, which includes a 5x zoom lens, 3-inch LCD, and HD movie capture, buy the SD970 IS.
• The best overall buy is the the SD940.

For the first time, I have no pick for best image quality; the SD880 from February 2008, which seems to have finally disappeared from the Internet's shelves (at normal prices), was the last of the Canon ultracompacts with image quality truly outstanding for its class. The current generation produces photos that are all pretty good, but relatively undifferentiable from each other and as flawed as the competition's.

That's my advice. If you're still undecided, you might as well let the salesperson steer you toward a camera.

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