Manual Control Options
If you want manual controls, this isn’t the camera for you. The Canon SD1100 has a “Manual” mode that provides the most access to controls on the camera, but they don’t include shutter speeds and aperture. The so-called Manual mode is really nothing more than a slightly more flexible Program mode.
Focus
Auto Focus – The Canon SD1100 has a through-the-lens autofocus system that Canon says is faster because of the Digic III image processor. The autofocus is not slow; there is still a tiny lag that differentiates it from film and high-end DSLRs, but this is about as fast as it gets on a compact digital camera. The autofocus is activated and then locked when the shutter is pushed halfway down.
In the Recording menu, you can choose the AF frame from these three options: Face Detect, AiAF, and Center. The Center focus is the fastest option because the camera doesn’t do any searching to find subjects. The AiAF is the camera’s default setting that uses the 9-area autofocus and superimposes green points on the LCD to show what is being focused. The autofocus frame size can be selected as normal or small in the Recording menu.
The face detection system is advertised to recognize up to 35 faces at a time. It comes pretty close to that. In testing, boxes were superimposed on four faces. Once the image was taken and it appeared for a three-second quick review, five boxes showed around faces. In the Playback mode, though, the camera showed that 18 faces were recognized. There is an “image inspection tool” in the Playback mode that acts similarly to the standard magnification tool, but automatically zooms in on faces. When the display button is pushed, it jumps from face to face so you can check the focus on all of them. The camera tracks faces fairly well and allows some rotation before they are unrecognizable to the camera.
The SD1100’s autofocus system normally focuses from 1 foot (30 centimeters) to infinity. In the Macro mode, which is available by pushing the left side of the multi-selector, the focus changes from 1.2 inches to 1.6 feet (3 to 50 centimeters). An Infinity mode is also available on the same portion of the multi-selector. Of note is a Digital Macro mode that allows you to photograph subjects in a short range of 1.2 to 3.9 inches.
All in all, the SD1100’s autofocus system is quick for a compact digital camera. Subjects are crisp and the face detection system is impressive.
Manual Focus – This digital camera does not have manual focus.
ISO
The SD1100 has automatic and high ISO auto modes along with a host of manual ISO options. ISO 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1600 are found by pushing the top of the multi-selector; these are the same as the ones on the older SD1000. Unfortunately, the noise that accompanies some of the higher ISO settings renders images almost unusable. Check out the Testing/Performance section for more details, but images used at the top two settings were very grainy.
White Balance
The Function menu houses the white balance options, which are also the same as those included on the SD1000: Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, and Custom. The Custom white balance is easy to set, as you only have to frame something white in the little superimposed bracket in the center of the LCD screen.
The custom white balance had some problems when we first turned on the camera. On one occasion, the image showed up with a heavy green cast in the live view (and we promise, we framed something that was completely white), but looked fine when the image was taken and viewed in the Playback mode. After about five minutes of turning the camera off and on, making sure the My Colors effects were turned off (they were), and pondering the issue at hand, the SD1100’s view in the custom white balance mode snapped back into reality and has worked just fine ever since. We'll chalk this one up to some sort of minor glitch.
Exposure
The Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS does not allow the shutter speeds and aperture to be manually controlled individually, but there is a +/- 2 exposure compensation range. This is available on almost all digital cameras, and is selectable in increments of 1/3 EV on the SD1100.
Metering
This digital camera has typical metering options available in the Function menu when the Manual mode is selected. Evaluative, Center-Weighted Average, and Spot options are available.
Shutter Speed
The SD1100 has a shutter speed range of 15-1/1500 of a second. Most of the time, the shutter speeds are not manually selectable. The only time they can be selected is when you want to shoot a long exposure. You can select 1 to 15-second exposures through a sub-menu in the Exposure Compensation menu. The camera automatically employs a long exposure noise reduction algorithm on long exposures from 1.3 to 15 seconds. Its effectiveness is questionable, though; images were still extremely noisy. Check out the Testing/Performance section for more.
Aperture
The SD1100’s 3x optical zoom lens has a nice wide f/2.8 maximum aperture that lets plenty of light in to hit the image sensor. When the lens is zoomed in, though, the max aperture shrinks to f/4.9. The minimum is f/8. These F-stops are common on compact digital cameras.
