I had my doubts before purchasing this one. From previous reviews it was clear that the picture and video quality are good, but battery life is really bad. And after using it for a while, it turned out to be true. It is a fairly simple device to use and for casual everyday picture/video taking it is a good device. Image stabilization is good and it has pretty good low light capabilities. Picture quality is also decent for a point-and-shoot camera.
What impressed me the most about this camera, both on the fact sheet and in real use, are the video capabilities. It does full HD, has dedicated video recording button and one can use the whole 10x optical zoom while recording. The video quality is good. It definitely rules out the need to take a dedicated video camera for every trip. Image stabilizer does reasonably good in handheld mode and even in full zoom level, but then again don't expect too much while doing handheld video shots: it is a rather small camera and for completely shake/wobble free shots, one must use some kind of extra equipment (like tripod or handheld steadicam). In addition, it has a nice feature of doing slow-motion shots in low resolution. It is definitely cool feature to experiment with and provides true slow-motion clips for experimental video editing. But that's about it, for practical purposes the video is far too low resolution.
And then there is the battery life... I guess I can wrap it up shortly: it is bad and having 1-2 or more extra batteries is a must. I purchased it with some cheap non-Canon replacement battery and it payed off immediately. Wish I had bought even 2-3 of those. Though, I didn't see any reason to buy a Canon brand battery, because it was about 1/4-th of the camera price, way too high in my mind.
There are definitely better cameras out there, but it is a rather solid everyday point-and-shoot camera, with plenty of zoom and image quality. Video shooting capabilities are a reason to consider this piece. And you can get one for pretty cheap by now.
The Automatic feature is wonderful for most shots, even detecting the type of shot and making settings to match.
The special additional features make the camera fun. A few of them are:
1. Set it to take 5 rapid shots and the camera picks the best one.
2. Set it to for smiles and it will wait until it detects a smile before taking the photo.
3. Set it for wink and it will take the shot after detecting the wink - this lets you get in the photo and signal when the camera takes the photo.
4. Taking photos at night, the camera combines 5 photos to create a great nighttime shot.
5. The movie feature lets you take up to 2 hours of video, if you get a 32 GB card.
All this plus Consumer Reports rates its predecessor as one of the top 2 digital cameras, and this one is even better.
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