Very Nice Point-and-Shoot Camera

My old Canon Powershot 620 died last year when I dropped it. 

As it was quite an old camera, I expected a newer model would work a good deal better.

I've had the camera for about two weeks and haven't quite mastered all the bells and whistles. But so far I've been quite pleased with it.

a) Things I liked:

The camera is quite light and compact.

I liked the 20X zoom. And even at 20X, in good lighting the pictures are sharp.

The lens, image processing software, or whatever is quite good. I found with my old camera, I often had to play around with the 'Levels' as there would be substantial at either end of the histogram where the colour level would register zero. For the SX270 in auto mode and in good lighting, almost none of that fiddling is required.

The snapshot rate is quite a bit faster than my old camera, even with letting the camera do auto-focus. It is in the range of a second or so.

The screen in the camera is 3" and, while not perfect, is still relatively usable in bright light.

The controls are more or less logical, though you will probably need to download and read the manual to understand and know how to use some of the features. However, "auto" mode works pretty well most of the time.

b) Not so Good Things:

I would have liked to have had a view finder with the camera. Unfortunately, these seem to be going the way of the do-do bird.

For some strange reason, Canon did not provide a cable to connect my camera to my computer. Perhaps everyone is now supposed to remove the memory chip and put it directly into the reader on their computer? Or maybe they have this model confused with their WI-FI model? At any rate, the cable from my old camera works just fine. So, for me, it wasn't a problem.

The camera feels mostly well-built. However there is a little plastic cover over the cable connections that has a bit of a flimsy feel to it. Again, perhaps Canon doesn't expect anyone to use this?

Overall, I'd say this is a good, relatively inexpensive point-and-shoot camera that produces pretty good pictures.