Canon PowerShot SD980 IS- Silver- First Touch Screen Camera From Canon
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Great touch screen and physical buttons, good photo quality, compact camera.
Thumbs Down:
No optical zoom for movie recording.
Inside the Trunk:
Bundled cables, software, charger.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Canon PowerShot SD980 IS is a 12.1 mega pixels camera. Light sensitivity options include – ISO 3200 (2Mpix), ISO auto, ISO 1600, ISO 800, ISO 400, ISO 200, ISO 100, ISO 80. It has 4x digital zoom, face detection.
Shooting programs include beach, snow, sunset, indoor, foliage, fireworks, aquarium, kids and pets, digital macro, slow shutter, stitch assist, portrait mode, high sensitivity, night snapshot.
There are special effects like vivid, sepia, color swap, vivid red, vivid green, vivid blue, color accent, positive film, black and white, darker skin tone, positive film, lighter skin tone. White balance presets include daylight, tungsten light, cloudy, fluorescent. Videos are stored in H.264 format and photos are stored in JPEG format.
Resolution options for videos are H.264 – 1280 x 720, H.264 – 320 x 240, H.264 – 640 x 480. Resolution options for images are JPEG 4000 x 2248, JPEG 640 x 480, JPEG 1600 x 1200, JPEG 2592 x 1944, JPEG 3264 x 2448, JPEG 4000 x 3000
The camera has zoom lens – 4.3 mm – 21.5 mm – F/2.8-5.9 which has focal length of 4.3 mm – 21.5 mm. Minimum focus range is 19.7 in and macro focus range is of 5cm. It has 5x optical zoom. Other features include built-in lens shield, UA lens, aspherical lens. Maximum shutter speed is 1/3000 second, minimum shutter speed is 15 seconds
The camera has three inch TFT LCD display. Connectors on the camera are composite video/audio output, USB, DC power input, HDMI output. There is also a SD memory card slot.
The camera comes with softwares like Canon PhotoStitch, Canon ZoomBrowser EX, Canon ImageBrowser and drivers & utilities. Supported OS for PC are Apple Mac OS X 10.4 – 10.5, MS Windows Vista and MS Windows XP SP2.
Additonal features include AE lock, FE lock, DPOF support, Exif Print support , In-camera red-eye fix, Digital tele-converter, RGB primary color filter , Blink Detection technology, Face Detection AF/AE/FE/WB, Motion Detection Technology, I-Contrast (Intelligent Contrast Correction) system, AF lock, Safety zoom, Direct print, Histogram display, PictBridge support, USB 2.0 compatibility, 720p HD movie recording, Face Detection Self-timer, Display brightness control, Scene Detection Technology, Camera orientation detection.
The USB cable, A/V cable are included along with wrist strap. The camera is powered by li-ion rechargeable battery
Razzle Dazzle:
The SD980 IS comes in four color options blue, gold, purple and silver. We got the latter model in our test centers. On the back of the camera is a three inch LCD display which is touch screen this time.
Inside Dope:
SD980 IS is a revamped version of the previous SD960 IS from the same manufacturer. The SD960 IS has serious drawbacks on its end and they have been resolved on this product which includes a touch screen and bigger LCD and longer zoom range for the wider lens. The physical controls have been improved and so is the video & photo quality but we feel it could have been better considering the competition that other players are offering in the market. If you are fan of touch screen cameras you will certainly love the SD980 IS.
This is the first outing for Canon in touch screen camera business and we must say they have done the job well. The screen is responsive and quite quick in registering our touches. The camera is not all touch screen and there are a few physical buttons on the device. In fact the touch screen is used only for shooting features and for the rest; you will have to resort to the buttons.
The touch screen can be used to flip through the collection of photos that you have on the camera. You can also zoom in and out of the photos by tapping on specific parts of the screen. We thought the best part of the touch screen was that you can tap on it to focus on specific subjects. Apart from that the touch screen interface is used to adjust exposure, flash mode choice and for changing the scene modes. The touch screen is used to enhance user experience and there are physical buttons on camera for all these functions in case you are more comfortable with them.
Active Display feature from Canon lets you move between your photographs, pausing and playing of videos and you can tilt the device to check focus on the photos. Again there are buttons for these functions in case you don’t like the touch screen much.
Apart from the touch screen the physical controls of this camera are quite similar to the previous sibling – SD 960. However the latter didn’t have the scroll wheel/directional pad that we saw on SD880. There are three options for shooting modes and you don’t get to play around with the aperture of shutter speed. The Smart Auto feature has 22 different scenes which the camera selects by itself when you choose to for the feature. In the program mode, you can control white balance, ISO, exposure compensation, light metering, etc and there are also a lot of scene options to choose from like indoors and portrait.
There is also a high definition (HD) 720 movie mode which lets you record clips up to ten minutes. There is 5x optical zoom but you cannot use it in movie mode which is quite disappointing. SD980 isn’t the fastest of cameras it takes 3.1 seconds between shots and and flash will further delay it to 4.5 seconds. It takes 1.6 seconds for the camera to start up and the shutter lag is 0.5 seconds in bright conditions and 0.8 seconds in dim light.
Photo quality is best when you go for ISO sensitivities less than ISO 200. At ISO 400 the picture quality starts degrading. Exposure, white balance and color are all good at ISO 400 or below. The Smart Auto mode is helpful if you are confused with choosing the modes, it picks the scenes that it thinks is the best for the given environment.
Photo quality is good as long as you stick to smaller sizes. This is a compact camera and the inferiority will start showing if you put challenging tasks like big photo prints in the camera’s face.
Nitty Gritty:
Canon PowerShot SD980 IS is a first touch screen camera from the manufacturer and we were glad that there were enough options with physical buttons in case you don’t like the touch screen interface. The controls are easy, picture quality is good but not the best. We will rate this product as one of the best in compact cameras.
