SD 950 IS
Ultra compact on Steroids

We have to admit that we received this 12.1 mega pixels and a Titanium body ultra-compact with skepticism. Does the world need another ultra compact with an incredibly small sensor stuffed of pixels? Let's find out.

Titanium Body

This is the heftier of Canon's ultra compacts, although not by much. It feels slightly bigger but still fits in most pockets and it certainly remains in the ultra portable category.

This camera follows the perpetual-curve design that has been a success for Canon and this new version is almost untouched, except for the inward curve in the front. Instead of having a protruding grip, this recessions provides a better handling. Canon's ultra compacts are exceptionally well built, yet the SD950 is even better. The titanium body is beautiful, elegant and more resistant.

Set of features

This is a fully automatic camera, so don't expect creative modes. Although there is a manual mode, you'll only be able to change the ISO setting and adjust the exposure up to two steps. The movie mode could be better considering the high resolution of the sensor. The biggest size for movies is 1024 but a bad news is that at such resolution the zoom is disable (both the optical and the digital), although you can use the digital zoom at lower resolutions (640 and under).

There are plenty of scene modes such as as portrait, night snapshot, kids & pets, indoor, foliage, snow, beach, fireworks, aquarium and underwater.

The auto focus is efficient featuring face detection.

With such a small camera, having a little more weight and a really good image stabilizer is really good. It works for both static and panning shooting modes. The Image Stabilizer works very well and it seems that Canon is going to include it in all its cameras. Having the Lumixes right behind, it's a move that seems to arrive slightly late and it is kind of strange because Canon developed lenses with image stabilization before Panasonic.

This camera has good ergonomics and is very comfortable. Although the camera can be held with a single hand, using both provides a very comfortable feel. The mode dial in the back provides helps even more to have a little more grip than other perpetual-curved cameras.

The LCD monitor has a good 230,000 px resolution and is visible even under bright light. This camera sports an optical viewfinder and we have mixed feelings about it: today's LCD screens are much brighter so the need of a ra rather poor optical viewfinder is not so crucial. On the other hand, having an optical viewfinder takes the average battery life of 220 shots to 580. So, it's not a bad idea having the tiny tunnel even if it covers only 80% of the frame.

The LCD monitor provides all the information you'll need (except a live histogram). In this new iteration, the Digic III shows the battery meter (it's incredible that Canon includes this basic feature only in the high end models) and it's good to see the selection of aperture and shutter speed as well as the ISO setting.

Once a photo has been shot, there is an option to choose two sets of review info: "detailed", that provides all the shooting info plus an histogram and "focus check" that let's the user decide if the photo was properly focused.

Although the set of features is very good, it's the same as other Canon cameras with no additions or positive surprises. It would be nice to have some better features considering the high price tag of this camera.

Optics

This luxurious ultra compact features a 3.7x optical zoom and a focal length of 36-133mm (35mm equiv.) that is practical, yet unsurprising. At the wide end it has a maximum aperture of f/2.8 which is nice, although it is slower at the tele end with f/5.6.

Overall the optical quality is very good and produces sharp images. Chromatic aberrations are very well controlled. Although barrel distortion is visible at the wide end is not a problem.

Button layout

The button layout is pretty much the same of other Digital Elphs, but with two welcomed additions: a play mode button (it was annoying to use the mode dial for that function) and the touch sensitive four way dial. We liked it on the SD870 and now we are getting more used to it and it is useful for both setting the functions and choosing a scene mode

Battery

The battery is a proprietary Li-Ion that provides average juice with the LCD turned on always and much better than average using exclusively the optical viewfinder.

Resolution

In this crazy mega pixels race is pretty difficult to imagine a serious photographer wanting to print a poster sized copy shot with a fully automatic ultra compact camera. That said, it's good to have those extra pixels when cropping photographs.This SD features a bigger 1/1.7" sensor. We don't know if it is the same sensor as the used on the G9, but from our comparisons it seems to be. It seems that there is one surprise with the SD 950 an it is image quality.

Image Quality

Besides having that titanium body and the 12.1 mega pixels the SD950 IS could have been ended just a pretty face, but it shines in the most important area of any camera: image quality.

At the end of the day the image quality is the most important feature of any camera. If not, then the crappy camera in cellular phones would be enough.

This camera delivers very detailed images, comparable to those made with the G9. The noise performance of this little Elph is even better than the G9 (at least with JPG's, RAW files are in a different league).

The image quality is impressive for an ultra compact at low ISO figures (more on ISO performance later) and a very nice surprise was to found that the SD 950 handles high contrast scenes better than the average digicam. The dynamic range has been been improved on this model.

Performance

The continuous shooting mode fills the camera buffer pretty quickly and slows down everything. Flash delay is annoying for social snapshots. Except for these two cases, this camera does a very good job considering that is managing 12 mega pixel files. The auto focus is fast and extremely competent.

The exposure is accurate and color rendition is also pretty good, although the processor tends to saturate reds as in most Canon cameras.

ISO sensitivities and noise issues

Knowing that this little camera has 12.1 mega pixels we anticipated a very low performance under low light. It is not the case, but this opens a question: if Canon is able to produce a 12.1 mega pixels camera that delivers a reasonable performance at the noise department, why does not produce cameras with lower resolutions and better performance under low noise? We compared this new model to the SD550 and we were surprised to see a better noise control now. But there is noise, and at high ISO levels there is a lot.

The image noise is already visible at ISO 80 and, unsurprisingly, it gets really horrid at ISO 800 and ISO 1600. That said, the SD 950 has the best approach handling noise in the entire line of Canon compact cameras: it's even better than the G9. It handles slightly better the chroma noise although it's a little too aggressive with luminance noise.

Canon PowerShot SD950 IS Noise Performance (100% crops)
ISO 80	ISO 100
ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1600

As you can see, the loss of detail at the highest ISO levels is unusable. This camera benefits with a more efficient noise reduction algorithm and less aggressive noise reduction.

The ISO shift function allows to choose a higher sensitivity level in low light conditions. This feature is assignable to the shortcut button.

That’s it for the techno babble. How does the SD950 IS feel?

The titanium body is very handsome, the 12.1 mega pixels provide an excellent resolution, and the image quality is the best on it's class with the best noise handling on its class. We would say that this is the best Digital Elph in Canon's history, but having a true wide angle focal length is still a pretty important feature for us. That said, you won't find a better sub compact camera. Although the set of features is unsurprising, the image quality, performance and noise handling are a very welcomed surprise.

We said at the beginning that we received this camera with skepticism. After reviewing it we are pleased with the results. We would really like to see a SD 970 sporting a true wide angle focal length.

This is an expensive camera: $350 (street). With that money you can get an extremely powerful (although less fashionable and compact) S5 and for $50 less you can have a real wide angle with the SD870. If you are not gonna need that rugged and beautiful titanium body and you can live with 8 mega pixels you can save $100 choosing the SD850.

The bottom line