I am the proud recent owner of a Canon PowerShot SD780 digital camera and feel the need to talk about it a bit.
After my recent rant on how the best camera is the one that is with you, I have to give this one high points for that very reason. This thing is absolutely tiny, as in smaller than my cell phone. In fact, I keep it in my front pocket right beside my cell phone and after only having it there for a day I don't even realize I'm carrying any extra baggage around with me. That's the number one thing I can say for this camera. You can carry it everywhere with you, without it being the slightest bit cumbersome, and it's right there at the tip of your fingers any second you want it. It is worth its price for that alone.
I have always been partial to Nikon's SLRs, but Canon's point and shoots, and this one is no exception. It's packing 12 megapixels (a fault I'll discuss later), and has loads of cool features to play with if you want, including very cool color modes I've always liked which will let you actually swap colors in a photo with one another, or single out a color and render everything but that color in black and white. Yet, at the same time, it is simple and straightforward and will just point and click if you have no desire to do anything but capture a photo. And it's really quick. I used a few point and shoots over the weekend and this one would start up and fire noticeably quicker than the others, which is important. My son turned 3 over the weekend and it was fantastic to be able to just grab this and get pinata bashing and candle blowing and then just stick it back in my pocket. At the same time I can just grab it whenever I see something inspiring and get that too. And, these things come off the camera at about 16x20" at 180 dpi. So, as far as resolution is concerned, there is more than enough (and even TOO MUCH) of it. Also, it has great video. I plugged it up to my 32" television and it looks great.
Some drawbacks: it has the standard 3x zoom, which is cool, but we need MORE WIDE ANGLE. Don't get so caught up in how far out these things will reach, I'm willing to bet you will find yourself wishing you could zoom out and include an entire subject in your images much more frequently than you'd ever think. Try fitting an entire person who is in any manner close to you into the entire frame. It won't happen. And you will wish it would. Also, 12 megapixels is just TOO MUCH for this camera, and it suffers from excessive noise because of it. This is a tiny camera, thus it has a tiny chip in it. All shoving 12 million sections into it does is create an electrical choas going on and introduce noise. This thing could easily be 6 to 8 megapixels at most and be all the better for it.
Now, though it has been much less than thorough, enough with techinical junk. Here are a few images I just snapped with it:
