Canon's PowerShot SD500 is one of the cheaper 7.1 megapixel digital cameras on the market. It features 3x optical zoom and is equipped with a 2-inch LCD display and record videos at VGA quality at 30 frames per second.

The SD500 is a wonderful little camera that fits easily in my shirt or pants pocket (don't put in rear pocket). It's metal except for the LCD and battery compartment.

I spent weeks researching a small form factor camera that would supplement an SLR. I ended up narrowing the pack to the SD500, Sony P200 and Casio Exlim 750 (the Pentax Optio S60 was not out at the time of purchase). Casio 750 is nice and small, fits in an Altoid tin, but it fails to deliver the color quality and consistency of the other two models. The Sony P200 had great features for the price, but would benefit from image stability to reduce image blur from hand held operation. I tested these at the local store after extensive online reviews.

I finally settled on the Canon after taking just a few images. It was clear that both flash and non flash images accurately captured the perceived subject's colors. I have had this camera for 3 weeks now and have taken about 150 pictures and a couple of videos at 640 x 480 at 30fps. You will want to purchase a few high speed 2GB SD card if you plan to do this often! Canon doesn't tell you that videos can only be captured up to 1GB at a time so get a Camcorder of you really want to capture continuous video.

The most important feature of any camera to me is the color fidelity. I've found that I rarely, if ever need to edit images that come from the SD500 in Photoshop. I was in Walmart the other day and passed by their Photo center. I noticed that they had kiosk set up to take in images from digital cameras so I pulled out the little camera and took out the SD card, inserted it into the kiosk and loaded and selected a bunch of pictures for printing. Within an hour the 4x6 prints were ready. All I can say is "Wow"! The images were sharp, clear color was as expected/desired. My family was surprised to see the photographs we had just taken a couple of hours earlier.

So far I've tried a few of the other features including color swap, continuous image capture, scene selection among others. The scene selection is adequate though adding more manual controls would make this camera a definite 5 STAR.

Bottomline, the beauty of the SD500 is that images will be captured as perceived and can be sent directly for printing without any user color editing required.



Link: Amazon