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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 16 reviews
- See all user reviews
Product summary
The good: Small and comfortable; responsive performance; decent images.
The bad: Few manual controls; noticeable fringing.
The bottom line: A very good compact camera, the 10-megapixel Canon PowerShot SD900 nonetheless falls short of its faster, more full-featured, albeit lower-resolution competitors.
Specifications: Digital camera type: Compact ; Resolution: 10 megapixels ; Optical zoom: 3 x ; See full specs
Price range: $524.95 check prices
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 10/05/2006
- Released on: 10/01/2006
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.
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
The camera generally produces very solid photos. They're extremely sharp in the center, though like many competitors' shots, there's severe softness around the edges of the frame, which can result in glowy edges on objects. Colors are a little cool but nicely saturated. As is typical of Canon cameras, the automatic white balance can't handle our warm tungsten lights. Noise was negligible to as high as ISO 400, and at ISO 800 became a tolerable, fine grain. ISO 1,600 images were predictably bad, with details hidden and colors muted by a pronounced layer of staticky, sparkly artifacts.
A solid, handy, compact camera, the Canon PowerShot SD900 nevertheless lacks some useful features offered by the similarly priced SD800 IS. Unless you absolutely need the extra pixels--for, say, cropping tightly on a portion of a photo or printing to larger than 8x10--you're probably better off with the faster, stabilized SD800 IS.
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User reviews
- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 16 reviews
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 3 of 16 user reviewsSee all 16 user reviews
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15 out of 15 people found this review helpful
"Great cam and near perfect pictures more than make up for no IS like its little brother."
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11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
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3 out of 5 people found this review helpful
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Where to buy
Canon PowerShot SD900:
$524.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$524.95 | Yes |
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