18 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
Style over picture quality
Date of Review: Jun 19, 2009
The Bottom Line: Good for an occasional picture where quality is not that important.
This is a very cute little camera. It is small and stylish, well built, fits in a pocket. This is the best part about this camera. After that it is mostly downhill.
The camera was purchased to replace my wife's broken Canon A85 4mp camera. Her favorite color is red, she likes small stylish gadgets, this camera is a lot smaller than the A85, it is perfect!! The camera's screen is big and bright enough and unlike most other compacts now, it has an optical viewfinder for times when the lcd viewfinder is unuseable on super bright days and such.
It has very few manual settings which is another plus for my wife. In Auto mode you have to do nothing but aim and click, it is supposed to do everthing else. In P mode, you can change ISO along with a couple of other settings but you can't change shutter or aperature. My wife isn't going to do anything but Auto mode so this is fine too.
The first test shots we did were inside using the built in flash. This is where the downhill slide started. The flash is very small and way under powered. It is good for distances up to 7 feet or so but after that, its like trying to light up a theater with a match. For the shots we took, the camera was in auto mode. The flash fired and it chose ISO 640! Looking at the pictures, I found the amount of noise way unacceptable. I then did a series of test shots using the flash indoors in P mode setting the ISO manually from ISO 80 on up. Until you get into the high ISOs, the pictures are under exposed. I also did the same shots using my DSLR Canon 50D as a comparison. I didn't expect the SD780 to be close but I wanted to have something to compare to. My wife, who is not that picky about image quality couldn't believe the difference side by side and said the images were horrible.
The next day I did some test shots outside. In Auto mode, the camera chose ISO 400. I did some tests of the same scenes in P mode using lower ISOs. The results were not impressive. ISO 400 is pushing the limits of this camera. At ISO 200 and below the results are better but not great. The pictures lack saturation, contrast and sharpness. You can clean up some of it in Photoshop but Photoshop can't work miracles and the person who uses this type of camera is most probably not a Photoshop user nor would they want to fix every picture they take.
I then started looking at similar images my wife took with her A85 4mp camera. They absolutely blow the SD780 away. The pictures are crisp, clear and lack the noise that the SD780 introduces into every picture. They have lots of detail and it is easy to crop and blow up the images.
Finally, I contacted Canon who didn't really have any answers so I exchanged the camera for another one hoping I got a lemon. I didn't. It is what it is.
I think part of the problem is that the industry is using megapixels to sell cameras. In theory, a 12 megapixel camera should have a lot more detail than a 4 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, the technology has not been developed to produce a clean 12mp image using the tiny sensors we have now. The result is a noisy image that loses the advantage of the extra megapixels. Who would want to blow up noise?
The camera also does video. I haven't even played around with it yet.
The SD780 is feature packed but the one thing you really need it to do, take good, clean, crisp pictures it doesn't do well. This is a problem that all the little compact cameras share. You can't get good pictures with a small high megapixel sensor and a little tiny lens. Thats why DSLRs have bigger sensors and huge lenses. The compact cameras of a few years ago with lower megapixel sensors did a much better job of taking good quality pictures.
