Canon PowerShot SD700 IS First Impressions Review

Viewfinder
The SD700 IS has what Canon calls a “real image optical zoom viewfinder,” but its image really isn’t that real. It is completely inaccurate, tiny and blurry, and the lens can be seen in the bottom left corner when in telephoto mode. The edges of the finder are distorted into a blur. The coverage itself isn’t great; when users frame a subject at the lens’ widest focal length, the image shows much more on top than is actually recorded. There is inaccuracy at the telephoto length as well. Another problem with the viewfinder is that the focus cannot be checked in it. Sometimes the view in the finder looks focused, but it isn’t focused at all in the LCD screen. So while having a optical viewfinder at least gives users the option in case the batteries are going downhill, this viewfinder is practically worthless. Avoid it if possible.

LCD Screen
The Canon SD700 IS has a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon LCD that covers 2.5-inches of real estate and has 173,000 pixels on it. The resolution is okay, but still not the 230K that the competition includes. The actual quality of the screen image is disappointing. The screen looks like a television in the days before cable. The image is garbled and looks a little fuzzy, especially in low light. However, though the view is blotched, things look fine once recorded. It’s just the live view that is garbled this way. The LCD screen has a wide viewing angle that makes it easy to gather a group around the camera for a slide show. Best of all, the screen has 100 percent coverage so what is seen is what is recorded in the image file.

Flash
The Canon PowerShot SD700 has a built-in flash with these modes: Auto, Auto with Red-Eye Reduction, On, On with Red-Eye Reduction, Off and Slow Synchro. The red-eye reduction modes send out very fast flashes instead of the long strobe some models use. This seemed to work just fine as there were no red eyes staring back from the test shots. The flash can reach from 1.6-11.5 ft in wide and 1.1-6.6 ft in telephoto when the ISO is set to auto. The flash in telephoto is a bit weak; most subjects are farther than 6.6 ft away when the telephoto is in use. The flash cannot be used in the macro mode; rather, it shouldn’t be used. The macro mode does not disable the flash, but the flash sure washes out anything closer than 1.6 ft. There is no flash compensation mode, which would have been useful for the macro mode; coverage is fairly even. Canon’s specs claim it takes “10 seconds or less” for the flash to recycle, but it doesn’t take nearly that long at all. It seemed to recover quickly.

Zoom Lens
The SD700 IS has a 4x zoom lens, which is a nice change from the usual 3x lenses on most compact models. The lens, which extends from the camera body in two segments, is protected by two plastic doors that snap shut and are sturdier than in previous models. The 4x zoom lens reaches from 5.8-23.2 mm, which is equivalent to 35-140 mm in 35mm photography. The lens shows some barrel distortion around the edges, but it’s only really noticeable if a face is too closely framed. The lens can focus as close as 0.79 inches in wide macro and 1.3-2 ft in telephoto macro. Normally, it can focus from 1.5 ft.

The Canon branded lens has a wide f/2.8 aperture in the widest focal length, but it quickly shrinks to f/5.5 in telephoto. Controlled by the zoom switch surrounding the shutter release button, the Canon lens has about 8 stops in its range of focal lengths.

The response of the lens to the control is a little strange. When the control is tapped in the telephoto direction, the lens will zoom in a lot and then out a little. It does this fairly quickly, but it still looks odd. Even odder is the noise that the auto focus system makes; I sounds like harsh, ugly static. More specifically, like the television static recorded on the cursed videotape from “The Ring”. Creepy.

The most marketed feature of the SD700 IS is its image stabilization technology. It has two modes: Continuous is on at all times and Shoot Only activates when the shutter release button is pressed halfway.