Canon SD750 — A Review

The Latest Article • Posted 1 year, 3 months Ago • March 31, 2007

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Two years ago, I got an SD300 for my birthday. That was my first camera. It was sweet. About a year ago I sold it to help finance my new 20D, which came exactly a year ago. And this year, I picked up an SD750 and traded in my 20D for a 30D. The 20D to 30D was a really minor upgrade, but the SD750 is what I’m really excited about.

This camera totally rocks. I wouldn’t use it for something serious (I’d use my 30D instead) but it’s great for carrying everywhere and small fun snapshots. It’s a bit like a toy. It works really well, does a great job and is totally solid — but is really fun. People like the 30D and lenses cause they’re so big and look cool, but the SD750 is just impressive and fun to use.

Like many low quality optics, it does well in sunshine but really starts to show its shortcomings in low light. That is where a DSLR and fast glass really shines.

7.1 Megapixels is cool. I’d take that value with a grain of salt. Consumers should know that megapixels are just one of the specifications, and not always the most important one, no matter what manufacturers and salespeople might try to convince of.

You could have a 16 megapixel sensor and image quality would still be half-decent (compared to a small 4mp sensor and a great lens) because it’s heavily sharpened, etc. and the lens is a tiny toy. So no matter how much and how fine of data you could record, you’re only getting light that is so sharp and focused and a lot of the details in those 7 million pixels are just being tossed in by the sharpening, etc. Same scenario as getting a high megapixel DSLR and then a lens that is really badly made. This is one thing that I think a lot of people fail to realize, it’s not a technology or computing issue, but mere optics. I don’t carry around giant lenses for nothing, and you can’t expect that kind of quality from glass the size of a marble. For this reason, I would suggest looking at other things like design, value, features, etc. before comparing megapixels. While there are some 10mp cameras out there (like the SD900), I would definitely rather have this.

And besides megapixels, a very important aspect of sensors is their noise. At higher ISO speeds, in less light, you’ll rack up a lot of noise and the pictures will look a bit weird.

That said, the quality is satisfactory even to me. In bright light it’s very great, and in the dark it gets the job done and the moment captured.

Depth of Field can be a bit of an issue. With these point and shoots with really small sensors, you don’t really need to worry as much bout focus since the focal length is so wide (like 5-17) that your depth of field is pretty huge. As a crash course: bokeh (background blur) is where you aren’t in focus. It can be good and bad. It’s great for portraits and is one of the big features of good lenses. It depends both on focal length (more on longer lenses), aperture (more on bigger apertures) and on distance (more when yo’re closer). On a DSLR, with focal lengths starting at around 24 and going up pretty high, they can be very very shallow (maybe a centimeter or less). With the point and shoot, even at a foot away, most of the shot was in good focus. While this means less missed focus, it will also mean that your shots will not pop as much. This is just something inherent in the type of camera, and not really for this specific model.

Sharpness I was actually impressed. It’s got a lot more resolving power than I was expecting it to.

From a design standpoint, it’s beautiful. I had previously had an SD300 (2 years ago) and after the SD3/400 I was very disappointed at where the ELPH line was heading. All of the cameras looked pretty odd, and I felt the design was getting worse. I think they finally fixed that with the SD750.

It comes in black and silver accents – I got the black one because it has sweet contrast, but I’m sure the silver would look nice too. I love the contours at the front and bottom – something I haven’t seen yet on a camera, though I’m sure it’ll be incorporated in many of the future models. Hopefully not, but I’m sure there will be a bunch of knockoffs.

It’s brand new – just came out – and has a bunch of sweet bells and whistles, along with all the basics. It’s a point and shoot, so don’t expect SLR quality results – but it does its job really well. Image quality is about as good as it should be for a camera of this type.

It’s got all the regular stuff: video capabilities, good image quality, flash, different ISO speeds, picture styles and presets, etc. that most cameras do. I won’t go over that, this is a review not a manual. Instead, I want to talk about the features that are really cool, new and impress everyone.

First off, face detection. A little gimicky, but it actually works. Pretty well. Last night it wasn’t so hot, because the lighting was pretty bad. But in sunlight or in a decently lit room, it works like a charm and can track up to 3 faces at a time. Why is this good? Well, since you aren’t specifying a focus point, it is up to it to pick one. And this way, you’ll always get the focus where it should be (on the eyes) in a portrait. not on the person’s hand, or the tree behind them. And it is so cool to see it lock on and track someone as their face moves around. Now if only it had the 1D’s Ai system to predict motion.

Next up: color accents. This looks real cool and leads to impressive, high quality pictures without having to play around in photoshop. Of course, it is all post processing – just done internally and on the fly rather than on the computer. But cool nevertheless. Basically, you select a color (by pointing to it and pressing a button) and then that is the only color that shows. The rest is greyscale.

Stemming from this, but slightly different, is color swapping. This is less reliable, and only really works well in certain circumstances, when the color really stands out from the scene (like against a green screen or something), otherwise you risk replacing more than you want. But basically you choose a color and then replace it with another color of your choice. And as with color accents, you can specify fuzziness to see how broad you want the selection to be. This can be used to change the color of someone’s shirts, or give them green skin, or change the color of a car. But it doesn’t always work perfectly, sometimes you pick up more or less than you’d want to. Still a very cool function, however – especially for the consumers who don’t want to bother doing post-processing later.

Price & value. It’s a pretty good deal, I’d say. All current-generation point and shoots are generally in the 300 range, and then previous and discontinued models fall from there. I don’t see price as too big of an issue here, because the price difference between this and about anything else would only be around 50 or 100, if any. It’s 350 at B&H, Amazon, etc. right now – might go down by around 50 over the next few months. The silver one (vs black) might be cheaper in some places.

Some issues: no RAW support. That I know of. This isn’t really a big issue, as if I wanted to do heavy post processing and extract the best quality from my photos I would be using a better camera. But I would’ve liked to be able to turn off all the extra sharpening and jpg compression to get an image without artifacts and noise.

No viewfinder. It feels weird not having one, but I guess it was taken out to fit in the giant screen. And point and shoot viewfinders are so small as to be useless, anyways – so not really a big issue.

I didn’t really do much research before I bought it. First off, there were no reviews out (I think this might be one of the first) since it pretty much just came out. I just chose the best looking Canon ELPH line. There might be something else that’s good by some other brand, but as far as I know and have seen, this is the best tiny Point & Shoot out there, in terms of design, quality and technology.

Recommended without reservations! See more sample pictures.

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