Canon PowerShot SX1 IS

Opinion: In general, love this camera. I do not do videos. I bought it for the zoom and to take pictures of butterflies without having to approach them too closely. And to take pictures of plants, including flower closeups showing enough detail to be able to id them. I have taken over 2000 pictures with it, and many of them have been excellent, even fantastic, and highly zoomed. (I never use the digital range)

OK zoom, fabulous for two years. Until "lens error, restart", something very very expensive to fix, evidently. It has happened several times, but it is a harbinger of more trouble. If you Google this subject, you can find a lot about it, including fixes that have (or haven't) worked for some. Others have had it right out of the box and gotten either satisfactory replacements or not. If you've got an out-of-warranty camera, though, you are stuck, and my feeling is $640 is a lot to dish out for electronics that are not going to last a while. And I have to add that I have owned another Powershot A320 (?) or something like that, the one with the swivle viewer (which did fabulous macros) which also failed, focus-wise. I loved it so much I bought another after the first failed, but I don't think I'll be doing that again.

The automatic focus often does not work for me. The camera seems to prefer focusing on the background. I bought an SLR mainly for the focus conrol, but having to carry two lenses instead of one and a heavier camera really made me miss the SX1's zoom feature. Now I have to carry two cameras because I never know if the SX1 will refuse to work!

It seems not to want to focus at certain distances, and at these same distances neither the Macro nor Manual Focus seem to work, either. I have lost quite a few photos because of this.
The supposed Manual Focus is a joke, sorry Canon. It has two modes, feet and inches. Sometimes when I need inches it absolultely won't get off of feet into inches. And the magnification rectangle in the center, while a great idea, hides so much of the overall frame that it is difficult to compose the shot. In fact that little wheel can be frustrating when you accidentally press too hard when wanting to change the manual focus and go into some other function entirely, like Macro or ISO.

Another think that made me buy the SLR was the time when I had a hawk perch about 15 ft from my house, in excellent light. I got gorgeous photos of it with the SX1, BUT though the highlighted areas were fine, the feathers under the tail, even though not that heavily shaded, showed practically no definition at all. Just a grey haze. Another manifestation of much commented-on the low-light problems of this camera. Fortunately, a lot of my work is in full sunlight. This could be an issue for some.

There need to be more reviews by people who are not just testers of new cameras or using a camera they just bought, especially expert photographers as opposed to amateurs like me. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect good performance in both macro and zoom, good and bad light, with same system, as many of the experts have said elsewhere. But I don't think it is too much to expect an expensive camera to work reliably, whatever it does do, even after it is out of warranty!! Another question unanswered in my mind is whether Canon cameras have a greater problem with zoom failures than other cameras (after extended use)

Opinion: I tested this cameras a cheap alternative to nowadays models. On paper there aren´t so much improvements on nowadays cameras.

The SX1 works with normal batteries, that´s fine I think. No rip-off with special Li-Ion packs with chips. You can get spares everywhere in the world. Only downsinde is that it is pretty heavy with 4 Mignon batteries.

The image quality is however a disappointment. Even at base ISO the pics show ugly noise artifacts. They lack some crispness and look like muddy cr@p. Not to talk about higher ISOs, they are pretty unusable. Even at sunny days this camera fails to produce some decent pics. Compared to pics of the S5 I owned sometimes ago they look worse and have less details even with 2MP more. RAW mode will not help.

A comment about the movie mode, the good one first, the camera beats todays entry level camcorders and still cameras in some aspects. The vids look pretty good in good light, sharp and detailled and smooth, although rolling shutter is a problem when panning even slowly. Sound quality is good, however this camera is pretty prone to wind noise and the wind noise reduction setting isn´t helping.
A downside is that this camera eats memory as crazy. A data rate around 41MB/s is a pretty wase of memory. Especially when you see the fact that some cameras with AVCHD compression produce better looking files with 17MB/s. You can record around 48 mins on a 16GB card.
The movies aren´t so good in low light, noise takes over and turns them into a garbling noisy mass, and because it seems that there is a limit at ISO1600 for them like in foto-mode the camera only records darkness and noise when the lux goes too low.

Opinion: I have not been happy with this camera. The pictures have always been noisy. In low light it is worse. With the flash you get an uneven picture. Previously had the Pro 1 which produced superior pictures to this camera. I am now moving to the T3i which I hope will provide the expected quality.

Outside this camera has done OK.

Opinion: I eagerly awaited this camera (ordered from 4 places and cancelled those that were late).

First impressions (compared to Powershot S3):

Overall size is quite a bit larger than the S3, especially lens.
Nice big clear TFT display.
EVF Viewfinder is clearer.
Buttons/functions easier to use and responsive.
Remote control is good (sensor on front of camera).
Wide angle is pretty wide, much better than S3, crops vertical height though.
ISO1600 is a waste, ISO800 not much better
Macro mode is better than S3 (no need for 500D lens)
HD video is pretty good quality.

My PC is too slow to play the Hi Def video clips, had to use someone else's. My PC spec is P4 3.0Ghz with HT, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 7600 GT graphics card. Looks like I need an upgrade...

Lens cap is a bit fiddly, but doesn't stress the USM if you forget to take it off before switching on as it clips to the lens and extends with it.

Finally a metal tripod mount.