Photographic tests
White balance
The SD700 IS has five white balance presets (daylight, cloudy, tungsten, fluorescent and fluorescent H) in addition to the default auto white balance. There is also a 'custom' white balance setting, which allows you to point the camera at a white or gray object and set the white balance manually. The custom white balance setting is remembered even if you turn the camera off. In normal outdoor shooting the auto white balance works perfectly (as confirmed by our studio tests). Indoors it's a bit more hit and miss, as we've seen with most Canon PowerShots incandescent (tungsten) lighting causes a fairly strong orange color cast (though switching to manual gives a perfectly neutral result). We've spoken to Canon about its approach to white balance and have been told that the warm colors we see when shooting under incandescent light are intentional and are intended to 'try to keep some of the warm atmosphere of this kind of shot'.
Flash
Macro
As is common to most compact digital cameras the SD700's macro mode is most effective at the wide end of the zoom, where you can get as close as 2cm - not bad at all for an 'ultra-compact', capturing an area just over 3cm across. At the long end of the zoom the performance is less impressive - 40cm subject distance capturing an area just over 10cm wide - but still pretty useful. There is inevitably some distortion when shooting very close up at the wide end, but it is not too strong, and certainly less so than many of its competitors.
Movie mode
Resolution
Resolution is up with the best cameras in this class (with the notable exception of the Fuji F10/F11, which still rules the roost), and the results are remarkably clean for an ultra compact. As you move towards the very highest frequencies there is a very small amount of moiré visible, but overall there's little to complain about here. There is a very slight fall off in sharpness towards corners, but to be honest it's not going to show in everyday prints, and is far less serious than we've seen with previous Ixus / ELPH models - or most of their competitors.
Crops |
![]() |
![]() |
---|---|---|
Click here for the full resolution test chart | Horizontal LPH Absolute
resolution 1400 LPH |
Vertical LPH Absolute
resolution 1500 LPH *moiré visible |
Distortion and other image quality issues
The SD700 exhibits moderate distortion at the wide end of the zoom - 1.2% barrel distortion (click here for test chart), but it's nothing to worry about on a camera of this type. On a more positive note there is no measurable distortion at all at telephoto end (click here for test chart).
Fringing
The SD 700 IS exhibits some very mild and very diffuse purple / blue fringing, though to be fair you only get it at the edge of overexposed areas, and we found only two examples in the 700+ shots taken for the gallery.
![]() |
|
100% crop | 35mm equiv., F2.8 |
---|
Noise
With tiny, high pixel count chips noise is always going to be an issue, and to a large degree this is more a test of the effectiveness (both measurable and visible) of a camera's noise reduction system. Designers have to balance the desire to produce smooth, clean results with the need to retain as much detail as possible (if you blur away the noise, you blur away image detail too). As noted in the PowerShot S3 IS review, Canon's approach with the latest 6MP cameras appears to be fairly subtle, and much less bothered about luminance noise (the graininess is a lot less visually offensive than color blotches). There is some softness as the noise reduction really kicks in at ISO 200, but ISO 400 is surprisingly good, though I think it's safe to say ISO 800 is for 'emergency use only' but overall these results are pretty good for a small sensor camera.
ISO 80 | ISO 100 | ISO 200 | ISO 400 | ISO 800 |
---|---|---|---|---|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
100% Crops | ||||
![]() |
Noise graph
Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard deviation of luminosity is on the vertical axis.
Measurable noise is unsurprisingly very similar at ISO 80-400 to the other cameras we've tested using this chip, and though it's offering nowhere near the performance of the Fuji Super CCD sensor (as used in the F10/F11) at ISO 800, it's a lot better than many cameras of this type. Luminance and chroma noise are low at ISO 80 and 100, producing very clean results without excessive noise reduction.
Comments