Canon PowerShot SX110 IS

Noise
Image noise is one of those sadly unavoidable facets of photography. It appears most as you ratchet up the ISO;  increased light sensitivity brings with it the visual static that disfigures your photos. You'll notice it across wide areas of a single color, and it looks like speckling across the picture. We test noise levels at the full range of manual ISOs, as well the camera's automatic ISO setting.

Noise – Manual ISO (6.27)
In the graph below, noise levels increase along with ISO levels as expected. Noise stays mostly at a reasonable levels up to ISO 800, which is probably due to some degree of automatic noise reduction processing, and then skyrockets at ISO 1600. While using this camera, as long as you stay at ISO 800 or below, you probably won't have too much trouble with image noise, but that jump at 1600 is telling. Stay away from the highest setting whenever possible.

As you can see in the comparisons chart, this is a slightly below-average performance for SX110, once again, mostly due to that major noise jump at the top ISO setting.

Auto Noise (1.39)
The SX110 IS certainly isn't the only camera we've had that's done abysmally on the auto noise test, but it's still pretty bad. In this test we set the camera on automatic ISO, and let it decide what's the best ISO for shooting our well lit chart. The Canon decided that ISO 200 was the right level to shoot at, a bit higher than you'd want for a brightly lit chart. Combined with an overall disappointing noise profile, this produced a very low score.

Low Light (6.91)
Our low light trials are run as two tests, the first under decreasing light levels, the second using long exposure under fixed illumination. The former is shot under four levels of illumination: 60 lux (about standard indoor nighttime illumination) down to 5 lux (about the light of a single candle in a dark room). We test for color accuracy, noise levels and saturation, much as we do with our color accuracy test. The Canon kept relatively good color accuracy across all the light levels, especially at 60 and 5 lux, as well as repressing noise levels down to 2.5% or below. However, the pictures had a tendency to come out under-saturated.

The second half of the test is shooting long exposures, once again using the GretagMacbeth color chart to look at color accuracy, saturation and noise levels. We shoot at sub-30 lux illumination for 1, 5, 10 and 15 seconds, which is the maximum exposure length afforded by the SX110 IS. As you can see below, the noise level stays pretty consistent across all the exposure times, and saturation floated at slightly above 100% for all of the photographs. Color accuracy was a bit worse than we would have liked for this test, straying surprisingly far from the levels we saw in the low light portion of the test.

Yet again, an average result from this Canon ultra-zoom. It managed to outperform the Casio and Panasonic we're comparing it to, but it really struggled against the older Canon, and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H7.

Canon PowerShot-SX110 IS Low Light Scores

Still Life
To demonstrate the effect of shooting at different ISOs, here are two series of photographs taken at every ISO available for the SX110 IS, under fluorescent lighting, with exposure setting to automatic. Click on the image to see a full-sized version, but be aware that this may take a significant amount of time to load because of the large size.

Video Performance (7.23)
One of the handy advantages to a point-and-shoot camera is its ability to record video as well as photos, so we would be remiss in our reviewerly duties if we did not test these facilities with the same rigor as we bring to shooting still images.