This was purchased as a replacement for my wife's Canon A85 4mp camera which recently bit the dust. Having had other Canon cameras over the years including my current 50D, I am familiar with the quality of the Canon product.
This camera has everything my wife wanted. It's small, it's red, it's stylish, it's red, it's cute, it's red, it has very few manual controls, it's red, Canon sells a nice leather case to fit it which is red, oh and did I mention it's red?
That's about where the good stuff ends. I should say the camera appears to be well built. It is totally a point and shoot camera as there are no manual controls to speak of. This is all fine if that is what you want.
The big problem is that picture quality is absolutely horrible. Anything over ISO 200 is worthless as the pictures are very noisy and grainy. In Auto mode, ISO is automatic and not user changeable. Using the underpowered flash, the camera picked ISO 640 which rendered a picture that was full of visable noise and artifacts. Outside in the bright sun, it picked ISO 400 which is borderline of the camera's limits.
Doing some testing in P mode. I did some sample shots using ISO 80, 100, 200 and on up. If using ISO 80 or 100 and the flash, your range is about 7 feet max. With this combination, the pictures were relatively noise free. For any distance over 7 feet though, the pictures are way underexposed at those ISOs. You must bump ISO up to 400 or more and then noise becomes an issue again.
Comparing the output of this camera to the old 4mp A85, the A85 blows this camera away. Looking at similar shots, the A85 produces relatively noise free pictures which are well exposed and saturated. The SD780's pictures are noisy and lack the saturation and contrast of the A85.
This camera may be ok for outdoor shots on a bright day where you can manually keep ISO below 400 but indoors and using the flash the camera will be marginal at best and only good for snapshots at 4x5. Forget about 12 megapixels. Unfortunately, this has become a big selling point that is meaningless for point and shoot cameras. Actually, more megapixels is a detriment with these cameras. Current technology is not good enough to pack that many pixels into such a small area without introducing tons of noise. The pictures produced by these 12 megapixel cameras are so noisy that you can't blow them up any larger then their default 4x5 because the quality so bad. If they took this same camera, lowered the sensor to 6 megapixel, and then had you compare the output of 6 and 12, you would be amazed at how much better the lower pixel count looked.
In any case, this camera has one big pro, it's red!!!
EDIT***********
I just wasn't comfortable with the camera as most reviews are rather good and I wasn't happy with it. So, I exchanged it for another hoping the results would be better. Well, I can honestly say, "ITS STILL RED!". Nothing has changed with the replacement.Get more detail about Canon PowerShot SD780IS12.1 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch LCD (Black).
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