Canon PowerShot D20 Digital Camera Review

Sharpness

Image sharpness is acceptable on the D20 (color fringing, however, is a different issue). It's quite good at the center of the frame, particularly at the widest setting where we measured over 2100 MTF50s. Sharpness at the periphery of the frame is decent throughout the focal range. But the in-between areas are noticeably soft and sloppy, dipping to 500 MTF50s in places at the telephoto setting. As with any point-and-shoot, the D20 applies some artificial pixel sharpening to increase contrast, but it's pretty judicious, and doesn't have a negative impact at regular viewing sizes.

The D20 earned better sharpness scores than the Pentax WG-2 and Panasonic TS4, though the TS4 is almost entirely free of color fringing, so edges and high-contrast areas in its shots usually look much sharper than in the D20's photos. The Nikon AW100 earned the best sharpness score out of this year's batch of tough-cams, almost entirely due to heinous edge sharpening. Take its score with a grain of salt, because detail sharpness isn't anything special. More on how we test sharpness.

Image Stabilization

Stabilization is most effect with Powered IS turned on, producing 10% better edge sharpness than without any stabilization. This won't have a huge impact in terms of real-world performance—maybe enough to take the shutter one stop below 1/30s and still get a crisp shot.