The Soulpass Project

The Canon PowerShot SX100IS is a good digital camera. A few years ago I had a PowerShot A60 — definitely money well-spent, loved the heck out of it. Unfortunately the construction of the A60 was crap and it ended up breaking, but it was a trooper while it lasted. At one point Canon did put out a CCD Image Sensor Advisory Service Notice, and fixed the problem out of warranty along with fixing a faulty review button! This was free, and it was years out of warranty! So I think that speaks volumes about the company’s customer service.

Back to the PowerShot SX100IS. While it’s not suitable for professional work, it does a fine job at point-and-shoot, and it goes fully manual: The ISO speed, aperture, shutter speed, flash output, white balance, and many other manual controls can be adjusted.

Low-light conditions may prove to be an obstacle with this one. While it is possible to take the ISO speed to 1600, it’s practically pointless. There will so much noise that the picture will likely be useless.

One interesting feature that’s more of a novelty for me is the face recognition. The thing can actually spot people’s faces! While I’ll probably never use this in practice, it’s just neat!

UPDATE: Some reviews on the web say that the SX100 has a really bad video capturing system. I disagree; there is a “low quality” mode that uses a high compression suitable for email. Using that setting your video will be of poor quality. It can do higher resolution and it does a decent job. It is true that you can hear the zoom motor while capturing video. It’s not that loud, and if you’re recording something loud such as a concert, it shouldn’t be a problem. Keep in mind that this is not a digital video camera anyway, it’s a point-and-shoot, and it does a good job with what it’s designed to do.

Tip: I think that the Night Snapshot mode works fairly well indoors with no flash if the room has ample lighting.

Tip #2: “Dragging the shutter.” While in Program (P) mode or Aperture Priority (Av) mode, if you press the Menu button and scroll through the options on the first page, you’ll notice one called “Slow Synchro.” That creates really interesting effects. With the flash open and on in those modes, the shutter will remain open shortly after the flash goes off. In low-light situations this helps to illuminate the subject (through the flash) while also bringing light to the background (through the shutter delay). Camera shake will cause the background to blur significantly.

So i just finished a bottle of arizona “rx stress” herbal iced tea. Not suprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be the magic solution I was hoping for. Perhaps they should reconsider the way they are marketing this stuff. *sigh*, I guess I’ll be sticking to cigarettes.