Canon PowerShot SD970 IS

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900 is a sleek, sexy sports car beside the Canon SD970’s SUV, at least when it comes to size and style. Sony brings eye-catching color, a slide-down front cover and slender 0.66-inch (16.3mm) physique to the party, where the bland beige Canon is nearly twice as thick (1.04 inches/26.3mm) and offers a conventional compact camera design, with only a curved left side hinting at the fact that it’s 2009.

Once you take the two out for a test drive, each camera has its performance advantages. The Sony has a very small lens up in the top corner, giving it significant problems with distortion and chromatic aberration (though image sharpness was still fine). The T900 offers far more accurate color reproduction than the SD970 when shooting stills (though this situation is reversed in video mode), and cranked out nearly four shots a second to the Canon’s paltry one. The key area where the Canon proved superior was image noise, where it outperformed the Sony at every ISO setting they share. The Sony does offer ISO 3200 where the Canon tops out at ISO 1600, but it’s a very noisy ISO 3200. Both cameras offer 720p video recording, with HDMI out for direct connection to an HDTV.

Unlike the other cameras in our comparison group, the T900 outdoes the SD970 when it comes to screen quality, with a 3.5-inch beauty featuring 921,000-dot resolution, versus the 3-inch, 461,000-dot Canon. However, the Sony display is a touch-screen that’s used heavily for controlling the camera, and there’s the rub (and we’re not just talking greasy fingerprints). The screen response is sluggish, making settings changes cumbersome. To make matters worse, the high-res screen has a low-res menu system that makes a very poor appearance compared to the razor-sharp view lining up shots and browsing your photos. The Sony indisputably has a higher ‘wow’ factor, and our performance testing turned up strengths and weaknesses for both cameras. We’d advise taking both a peek and a hands-on poke at the Sony screen before making an investment, though. We found the Canon a much easier camera to shoot with.

Canon PowerShot SD970 IS vs Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900
	Canon PowerShot SD970 IS	Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900
Price	$379.99	$379.99
Colors	silver with gold	silver, bronze, red, black
Dimensions	94.742mm x 26.416mm x 56.896mm	98.044mm x 16.764mm x 60.452mm
Optical Zoom	5x	4x
Sensor	1/2.3"-type, CCD, 12.4 megapixels	1/2.33"-type, CCD, 12.4 megapixels
Display	LCD, 3.0 in., 461000 pixels	touchscreen LCD, 3.5 in., 921600 pixels
Viewfinder	none	none
Manual Controls	custom white balance	ISO control
Connectivity	A/V, USB, microHDMI
Battery	removable lithium-ion, NB-5L	removable lithium-ion, NP-BD1