Canon PowerShot SX210 IS

WideWorld reviews the latest Canon: 14.1 Megapixels with 14x optical zoom

Product

Canon PowerShot SX210 IS digital compact camera

Promise

With a wide-angle 14x optical zoom and Canon Optical Image Stabilizer at its heart, plus full manual control and HD movies, the compact PowerShot SX210 IS is an alliance of power and style.

Performance

A digital compact camera that seems to have it all requires some relentless testing conditions. "Take more than pictures, take stories", they said.

How about the story of some Guernsey lads, cruising into Fermain Bay at sunset with a wakeboarder in tow, picking me up and proceeding to then wakesurf as night draws in under a full moon? In formal testing terms - fast moving subjects in low light.

With a one-touch recording button I was filming in 720p HD between stills, saving fiddly dial-turning mid-action from the outset. The 14x wide-angle optical zoom is silent and relatively smooth. While the auto-focus and auto-exposure did fairly well to compensate for the difficult conditions, there were occasions where focus was momentarily lost mid-zoom. Despite this, the video review shows how quickly exposure is corrected and focus maintained while the PowerShot tracks the moving subject. In addition, the Optical Image Stabilizer copes nicely with a zoom that is equivalent to a 28 - 392mm on a very bumpy boat.

Snapping away on deck, the PowerShot's biggest let down was drive and processing speed. While there is a continuous shooting mode, it lacked the speed to capture my specific action sport requirements - the subject being out of frame by the next snap with a delay of almost a second between shots. On the upside, Smart Auto Face Detection meant that the human subject always got priority focus.

The camera also has a manual mode for those purists that want just the right aperture and shutter speed, but with such intelligent automatic functions you might discover your lazy side.

The SX210 IS is packed full of shooting modes should you become bored with merely pointing and shooting. These include some fairly unique settings such as miniature effect, fish-eye effect, colour swap and colour accent.

Even self portraits or group shots have advanced. Canon have gone a step further than self-timers and introduced Smart Shutter, where a predetermined amount of snaps are taken when you literally give it the wink.

Verdict

This is a fantastically intelligent travel camera for getting close to distant subjects in great resolution. As one of the leaders in its category for spec, it does have its pitfalls. You can of course capture some great footage and photography in tough conditions as seen in the video - but the drive and processing speed were disappointing for my style of shooting. For resolution, zoom power and functionality all jammed into a compact size however - it's pretty hard to beat.

See WideWorld's video review of this product here