Canon PowerShot SD780IS12.1 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch LCD (Black) Immediately

Before this camera I had owned only sony cameras,thus I am comparing to them.
The first thing that bothered me about this camera is how slow the operations is. Let me explain:
Let's imagine I have it in my pocket and I walk down the street and I see something interesting I want to take a picture of? With Sony T20 I reach into my pocket and by the time I get it to my eye level I have already slid the cover turning the camera on and it's fully operational, I am ready to take a picture.If I need to use the zoom,it's fast and responsive.
With canon: I reach into my pocket, I have to look at the camera to find the power button which is not raised and is also the same color as the rest of the background. 2-3 sec later I locate the button and now I need to press with my nail on it to turn it on. Very hard to do because it's also very small! Now I have to wait another 2-3 seconds for the thing to boot up. Then I have to wait for it to focus another 1-2 sec, the it tries to detect the scene ( I always leave my cameras in auto mode in case I need to take a picture fast and I have no time to play with settings). Scene detection doesn't work on this camera very well,so it will take another 2-3 sec until it just decides to switch back to auto mode.
If you need to use zoom, after each zoom adjustment it needs to start the whole focusing and scene detection again. So on average it might take you around 15 sec to take a shot!

Yesterday, I was walking in the park and this amazingly hot girl ran by me in booty shorts. Naturally I wanted to snap a picture of that. By the time I got the cam to be operational she was getting further away from. I decided to use zoom ( which is only 3x) but the camera could not focus on her body as she was running away from me. And that's when I decided to return this camera!

The intelligent scene detection is a joke! I took about 200 pictures in different environments and it almost never detected the right scene. I only see it detecting macro consistently but it also detects macro when you try to take a picture thru the window glass. Of course you get a picture of the glass and not of what's outside. I took pictures inside my room using different lighting,outside also with different lighting conditions, the intelligent scene detection does more harm than good. I'll never forget how my camera decided to use flash on a bright sunny day when I was taking a pictures of the mountains miles away! wow!

One of selling points of this cam was HD video. It looks good if there's enough lighting,but under any other conditions it's grainy with way more noise that any sony camera has. If you don't have a mac computer you will most likely not be able to play videos anyway. My pc computer which has no problem playing latest 3d games like "Crisis" and also having an ATI HD video card could not handle the video from this camera. I don't understand why would Canon decided to use Apples MOV format? Basically if you have a PC, you are not going to able to edit or even play videos.

The zoom on this camera is really slow too. The lag is about a second between you pressing on the lever and anything happening,then of course the cam needs another 2 seconds to focus. Whe it does start to move it moves way too fast,so you have to go back and forth before finding the right setting. Forget about taking pictures fast when you need it.

Also the optical zoom is disabled when shooting movies, and if you use digital...hm..let's just say the tiny 12 mega pixel sensor is not going to perform well. Just use your cell phone camera and you probably going to get a better picture!
After about two weeks, the lsd screen started losing pixels, so about 25 of them are gone already.

To sum it up:

extremely slow,
hard to operate
forget about movies unless you got a mac comp.
zoom is slow
the intelligent scene detection doesn't work at all!
noise in pictures and movies
lcd failed before 30 days.

ask me questions, I'll keep it until next Monday when my new Sony t90 comes in.


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