Canon Powershot SX10 IS, A New Standard in Super-zoom Quality
Canon Powershot SX10
Product Review: Why go SLR? Power finally arrives for the portable digital camera.
By John R. Ghysels, Special to Technology-Report.com
Many picture buffs like myself are torn between the weight, expense and size of many digital SLR’s, and the increasing power and convenience of the near SLR portables. Hardcore travelers like myself know the convenience of throwing a camera in a case or backpack and the hassle that the weight, care and feeding of an SLR can pose on such trips.
Fortunately, it looks like that a reasonable price and high quality has finally come to super-zoom portable cameras. This item, only introduced in October of 2008, is setting a brand new standard for others to follow. Earlier “super-zoom” models; zooms in excess of 10x or 12x, suffered from image quality problems as long zooms strained the limits of their tiny processors. The long zooms need to capture light and reduce the effects of vibration and all these negative effects increase exponentially with each increase in zoom power. It used to be that only the large lenses and higher sensitivity power of expensive SLR’s solved this problem.
It appears that processor sensitivity has finally caught up with the portable 20x optical zoom, if the enthusiastic raves on Digital Camera HQ http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/digital-cameras/canon-powershot-sx10is_product-reviews.html, and www.amazon.com as well as other sources are any indication.
Even more exciting, the price seems to be falling toward the $300 level as I write this, despite the surprisingly high demand that has emerged for many gadgets during the 2008 holiday season. Might be worth picking one of these up for your holiday or summer travels. I definitely will.
John Ghysels, 11/30/2008.
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