Is that a camera in your pocket?

Here's the tiny little camera I bought today. It is the Canon SD780 IS and is super small - about the size of a credit card and about 0.7 inches thick. Very sweet.

Some of the nice things about this little device is its 12 mega-pixel sensor, image stabilization and the fact that it can take High Definition (HD 720p) video. High Def... that's amazing!!

The main compromise that is needed in order to fit all this technology into such a minuscule package is that the lens is small. A small lens means that it doesn't let in much light, so when taking a picture in mildly dark settings, either the ISO must be increased (significantly) or the shutter speed decreased.. both of which tend to result in poorer picture quality.

Although these quality issues are a concern, it is a well-recognized tradeoff when choosing a point-and-shoot camera versus an SLR. That said, there are larger and more expensive digicams that suffer less of these tradoffs, but I decided for my intended use (snapshots), the compact size is what will win the day for me. I will most certainly have this camera with me more often (and less obtrusively) than even a larger digicam... I can say that a slightly lower quality P&S camera in your hand takes significantly better pictures than a $10,000 SLR setup sitting in your closet.

I am still in the testing phase, but so far, I can say that the video capabilities are quite amazing. Really nice. This high quality resolution comes at the expense of memory space... I took a 2 minute video while I walked around my back yard and it took up 385MB of memory! That's a chunk, even if you have several 8GB cards on hand. Anyway, I typically take less than 1 minute videos of the kids and that is about enough (for both sides of the viewfinder).

For photos (my main use) it is very sensitive to low light situations. I think that under the majority of photographic circumstances, this camera will produce consistently good results. For more challenging situations, it will be important to use some expertise and good photographic judgement to get quality shots.

One last comment - what is up with camera manuacturers and the battery/card doors? These are being built more and more cheaply all the time - the SD780 is no exception. I have seen similarly fragile designs on other brand name digicams too and I just don't understand it. Please Canon, Nikon, Panasonic... please charge me the extra 15 cents for a decent hinge and metal door. Gosh!

Summary: Good photos, cool HD video a reasonable price and the form factor is simply exquisite... what a sexy little camera.

UPDATE: Continued testing this camera and found a dead vertical row of pixels. Appears as a thin white line on photos and video... returning to Best Buy tomorrow for an exchange. My hope is that this was a defect found only on this example and not a chronic manufacturing issue with this Canon camera. I will certainly test the next one too.