A very good compact camera, the 10-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD900 nonetheless falls short of its faster, more full-featured, albeit lower-resolution competitors.
The 10-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD900 manages to be stylish without being inconvenient or awkward. Its sturdy metal body, an attractive matte-gray with black accents, is smooth and slightly curvy, and at 6.7 ounces and 1.1 inches thick, it's just the right size to fit into a jacket pocket. All the controls are on the camera's right side, so nearly every button is within thumb's reach for comfortable one-handed use. A 2.5-inch LCD screen takes up most of the camera's remaining back panel but leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder. The viewfinder is small and awkward, but it provides a welcome alternative to the LCD.
While the SD900 is heavy on style, like most of the SD series, it's pretty light on features. You can adjust the white balance, the exposure compensation, the ISO sensitivity, and the metering settings, but in true point-and-shoot fashion, most shooting happens with the camera in automatic mode or through its handful of scene presets. It offers 30fps VGA movie capture or XGA (1,024x768) movies at 15fps.
Unlike the SD800 IS, with its relatively fast, wide-angle lens, the SD900 sports a rather mundane f/2.8-to-f/4.9, 37mm-to-111mm-equivalent model. It features the recent Digic III image processor, which Canon claims improves performance, image quality, and battery life over the previous chip. We've haven't seen any significant improvement over past-generation cameras, but the SD900's predecessors, the SD600 and the SD630, already boast strong performance and image quality.
The Canon PowerShot SD900 is a moderately fast shooter, especially for a 10-megapixel model. After waiting 1.3 seconds from power-on to first shot, we managed to snap one photo every 2.3 seconds. With the onboard flash enabled, that wait increased to a still-respectable 3 seconds. The shutter felt quite responsive, lagging only 0.5 second in bright light and 0.9 second in dim conditions. Burst mode was predictably slow, shooting a full-resolution photo once every 0.9 second.
Summary:
alaTest has collected and analyzed 791 reviews of Canon IXUS 900 Ti / PowerShot SD900 / IXY 1000 from international magazines and websites.
Experts rate this product 78/100 and users 86/100. Comparing these reviews to 540866 other Digital Compact Cameras reviews gives this product an overall alaScore™ 90/100 = Excellent.
Summary: The Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital ELPH features 10 megapixels, 3X zoom, a large (and now high resolution) 2.5 inch LCD, ISO 3200 high sensitivity and a stylish titanium body.
Summary: . When you just want a camera you can whip out and snap-snap-snap, you'll be happy with the PowerShot SD900. If you're nitpicky about image quality, consider a 5- or 6-megapixel point-and-shoot. You'll save a few bucks and be less likely to encounter ...
Summary: Camera manufacturers have been producing expensive special-edition titanium-bodied SLRs for years; the combination of durability, strength and lightness (titanium has the highest strength to weight ratio of any metal) offers some real benefits for ...
Summary: Strangely, even with such a fine screen, an optical viewfinder is still included. This is small, hard to see through and has an obvious parallax error - it's difficult to understand why Canon has bothered with it at all
