Digital Home Thoughts: DCRP Review: Canon PowerShot SD850 IS

"I've long been a fan of Canon's Digital ELPHs, and the PowerShot SD850 IS illustrates why. It stylish, ultra-compact, and well built. It has a gorgeous 2.5" LCD display and an optical viewfinder, a combination you won't find on most cameras in this class. It offers a few manual controls, just the right amount of scene modes, and not too many gimmicks. It's not the perfect camera, but as ultra-compact cameras go, it's certainly one of the best. The PowerShot SD850 IS doesn't look a whole lot different than the SD700 before it, but that's okay. It's a compact camera made almost entirely of metal, and it feels solid in your hands. There aren't too many buttons to deal with, though the ones you will find are on the small side. The SD850 features a 4X optical zoom lens, with a standard 35 - 140 mm focal range (check out the SD870 if you want wide-angle). Inside the lens is Canon's effective optical image stabilization system, which reduces the risk of blurry photos and shaky movies. On the back of the camera is beautiful 2.5" LCD display, with excellent sharpness, indoor/outdoor visibility, and color."



I'd recommend looking at the Digital ELPH map that is at the beginning of the review, it shows product timelines and updates which is pretty useful to know given how many models are out there these days. The SD850 IS appears to be getting really good reviews from what I have read and this article is no different. If you own an SD 700IS then this would be a nice upgrade. There is of course that DIGIC II hack that we posted last week that gives you all kinds of SLR functionality which is not available for DIGIC III chips yet (which is what is in most of the new Canon cameras) but I am sure something like that will be out soon enough.