New Camera for the Mrs.

[bentcountershaft]

My wife has been wanting a new camera for quite a while now. Despite my advice she didn't want a S95. I tried really hard for that but she wanted something that "zooms a long way away and takes good pictures in the dark and fits in my pocket and comes in a pretty color and..." so I bought her this stupid thing:

(Please excuse the noisy pic, it was dark and I wasn't going to go through too much trouble to take a pic of her pink camera and "the cute little tripod" so here it is. It's a Canon SX230HS, doesn't shoot raw, it's a compact superzoom (28-392 equivalent) and it's, well, pink. It does have a few things going for it though. It can be used in full manual even manual focus, 3200 iso available (I'm sure it's awful, but it's there), a silly little fisheye type setting (see below) and the really nifty part: When in macro mode it has a minimum focus distance of .39"

Fully zoomed out with flash(optical only, haven't tried the 4x digital zoom yet, hope I don't have to)

And the fake fisheye:

So all in all, I guess it could be worse. Image quality doesn't seem to be as bad as I would have guessed so time and circumstances will tell. It just came in the mail today (along with my 430EX2) so I've spent all of ten minutes playing with it but if anyone is actually interested I'll post some thoughts and more shots with it in a few days. It sells for $299 at most places and I got a kit from Adorama (Camera, spare battery, minipod, 4 gig SD card and a cheesy little case for $308. That price was for the pink only though. Black and blue cost $330. Even they know that pink is stupid.

 

[volmon]

I would be interested in seeing more results from this camera.

I have never been really impressed with any of the powershots, my heart pulls for Nikon, but they are a little worse IMO. I think that Sony makes the best point and shoot for the average consumer using AF. My experience comes from a couple years working as a major theme park photographer, where I was asked to take pictures with their camera also - I probably handled every p+s on the market between 2005 - 2009. I always found that the Sonys from the medium to high end had the sharpest day shots, fastest AF - even facefinder - and the cleanest night shots. It was actually hard to blow out a picture with the sonys, whereas the Cannon, Nikons, and Kodaks all varied. And only the Sonys seemed to be able to take shots at night off of tripod. Of course, I was sitting there with with side by side comparison with a much more expensive DSLR kit, but that was just my experience. I also didn't have time to goof with individual settings on each camera.

So, if cannon is picking up the slack finally, it would be good to know as I am looking for a p+s for my mother for Christmas.