On the plus side, this Elph's movie capabilities are outstanding and include in-camera editing features. You can shoot 640x480 clips with monaural sound at 30fps for as long as your memory card holds out with an optional high-speed SD card, as well as 60fps clips for up to 60 seconds at 320x240 resolution.
Performance was another big plus, thanks to the new Digic II DSP. The PowerShot SD300 woke up and reported for duty in about 2 seconds and thereafter was willing to snap off a shot every 1.2 seconds (4.6 seconds with flash). In burst mode, we captured six images in a hair more than 2 seconds at full resolution and lowest compression, but if you're willing to sacrifice a minimal amount of image quality and switch from Super Fine to Fine compression, this Canon will happily snap away at a 2.4fps rate up to the capacity of your memory card.
Shutter-lag times were good, amounting to only 0.7 second under high-contrast lighting, and just 0.9 second in low-contrast lighting conditions, thanks to the built-in focus-assist lamp. Battery life was impressive at 692 shots during our tests, which included 50 percent taken with flash, lots of zooming and card reformatting, and other calisthenics. However, the PowerShot SD300 provided scant warning of impending battery death: the first and only indicator appeared about 40 shots before the cell pooped out.
The LCD viewfinder works well in all but the brightest light outdoors if you can tolerate a little ghosting during subject or camera movement. It's preferable for careful composition to the smallish optical viewfinder, which shows only 82 percent of the image.
Image quality was good for a 4-megapixel snapshot camera, with an adequately wide range of detail in highlights and shadows, nice color saturation, and only a slight tendency to produce yellow flesh tones. However, images were not exceptionally sharp, and JPEG artifacts were noticeable when we enlarged the images. Chromatic aberration in the form of purple fringing showed up prominently around backlit subjects. Noise wasn't visible in our images at the lower ISO settings, but it appeared in modest amounts at ISO 400. The automatic noise reduction applied to exposures of 1.3 seconds or longer helped a bit.
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Where to buy
Canon PowerShot SD300:
$549.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$549.95 | Yes |
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