Pocket-Sized Powerhouse: The Canon PowerShot SD400 Digital Elph

By Jonathan Berohn

When the biggest thing about a camera is its name-and that one's really quite a doozy-you know you're in for something really cool or really disappointing.  With the PowerShot SD400, Canon delivers an ideal blend of functionality and ease of use in a camera that's compact enough to fit easily and comfortably in your pocket.  With a street price of between $250 and $299, it won't put too much of a dent in your budget either.

Small Size, Big Performance

The PowerShot SD400 is what I always expect a digital camera to be.  Being something of a camera snob (and, OK, having been known to be generally just a tad fussy in general) I've always been of a mind that if I wanted to lug around a full size SLR I'd rather use my Nikon FE.  As far as picture quality goes, it still blows away anything digital, and these days it's a simple matter to get a CD of your pictures when you get prints developed.  For me, a digital camera is about convenience and portability.  In other words, I want small.  At 3.4 x 2.1 inches and weighing a miniscule 4.6 ounces-yes, Canon ad reps, I rounded up-the PowerShot SD400 is great for sticking in a purse or pocket.  If you can carry a cell phone around, you have plenty of room for this camera.

Of course, the potential down side to small cameras is small buttons and controls.  After reading a review of under $300 digital cameras on the New York Times, I decided to check out the Kodak Easyshare V530, but found it's tiny buttons truly a challenge for my less than dainty fingers.  The PowerShot, on the other hand, makes the controls about as large and easy to use as you could expect to see on a small camera.  It's not like using an SLR or a full size video camera, but that's not really realistic-or even particularly desirable on a small camera.  When it comes down to it, the controls on the PowerShot are big enough that I can use them without having to resort to a magnifying glass.  It's simple to use the slider on the back to jump between photo, video, and playback modes, and, for anyone whose ever picked up a video game controller, the D-pad (yes, you know what I mean) on the back makes changing photo modes, setting your flash preferences, and viewing and deleting pictures a snap.  The 2-inch LCD also gives a great view of your subject (and your pictures).

The Pictures

Even when your first explicit concern is portability, and your second functionality, picture quality is always right there, too.  There's no point buying a fancy little camera that's easy to use if the pictures it takes are dogs.  Well, that's not a concern with the PowerShot SD400.  It checks in a 5 megapixels, which is plenty unless you plan on making wall size posters and such. If you really need it, you can upgrade to the SD 500 and 7.1 megapixels for another hundred bucks, but if you really want to take the kind of pictures that you might want to blow up that size, I'd look hard at the SLR type digital cameras or even-gasp-look at a film camera.

Anyway, I digress. The pictures on the SD400 are both bright and crisp.  The optical zoom goes up to 3x, and the 4x digital zoom lets you shoot up to 12x without too much noticeable deterioration of image clarity unless you're shooting in low light.  The auto focus and auto flash both do a pretty good job of selecting the appropriate settings for you.  There are also preset modes for panorama, close-ups, red eye reduction, and such and custom color palette adjustments you can make.  All in all, the PowerShot SD400 takes great pictures and gives you a fair amount of control (short of the manual operation you would expect from an SLR, of course; but that's really not what you should be buying this kind of camera for anyway).

The PowerShot also gives you several options for how you shoot, review and store your pictures.  You can choose to shoot with or without a shutter delay.  You can opt for one picture at a time and immediate review or choose the continuous shooting mode.  This mode lets you keep taking pictures as long as you hold the shutter down.  The number you can actually take without a break depends on your memory card.  With my 1-gigabyte card, I stopped at 50 continuous shots because I was bored of taking pictures of my office wall.  In other words, you have plenty of pictures to follow whatever action sequence you are photographing.

Obviously, when you are using a digital camera, you need to record the pictures on some sort of memory device.  The PowerShot uses SD (secure digital) memory card.

More on Memory

Naturally enough, the memory card that Canon includes with the camera is, well, pathetic.  At 16 megabytes it can hold a whopping 5 of the highest quality photos the PowerShot can take.  It can hold up to 127 of the poorest quality photos, but those are truly poor quality.  If you want to take pictures like that you don't need to buy a 5-megapixel camera.  In terms of reasonable 5-megapixel photo quality, you can stretch the 16 meg card to 9 pictures.  In terms of video, the base card is even worse.  It will only hold 6 seconds-yes you read that right-of high quality video and 1 minute 39 seconds of the poorest smallest video you can imagine.  The long and the short of this story is obviously that you will need to buy a memory card to truly enjoy your camera.

Unless you like to play "swap the memory card" or enjoy lugging your laptop around with you everywhere you go, I would recommend buying at least a 512-meg card.  With 512 you can save up to 339 good quality photos and 190 highest quality shots.  In terms of video, you can record anywhere from 4 to 55 minutes depending upon the quality you want.  I went, as I mentioned above, for a 1-gig card.  That translates into over 700 high quality pictures and 8 to 110 minutes of video. Essentially that means I can easily shoot an entire vacation's worth of pictures without filling up my memory card.  Certainly, 1-gig memory cards are more expensive, but with the constant flow of rebates and special offers, they are easy to come by for under $50.  If you think about all the money you'll be saving on film, that price really doesn't look to bad at all.  Canon, of course, cautions you that some cards may not work in their cameras, but most of that is really advertising spin.  If you buy a memory card form any sort of reputable computer retailer you don't have much to worry about-especially since the camera gives you an option to do a low-level format of your new memory card.  I bought a PNY SD card from CompUSA and have had no problems with it at all.

Video

Ok-first things first: if you want to use your camera primarily for video, you should buy a video camera instead of a PowerShot.  The PowerShot is-as it should be-first and foremost a still camera.  That does not mean, however, that the video it does shoot is unwatchable.  The main limitations, aside from storage, which ought to be enough to convince you to buy a video camera for any but very occasional video needs, is the microphone.  Yes, it's functional, but it's certainly not going to make anyone forget about the sound quality you get from good video cameras.  Simply put, the PowerShot takes more than adequate video for that spur of the moment event you want to snag a quick clip of.  If you regularly want to take long movies, you should consider a real video camera.

Software and Printing

The PowerShot comes bundled with software for both PCs and Macs.  It also comes with the firewire to USB cable you need to download your pictures to your computer.  The software packing has importing and editing programs, but they aren't necessary-especially on the Mac side.  I can't speak for Windows users (although apparently XP users don't need the software either), but iPhoto on the Mac has all the features I need to edit and manage my pictures.  For heavy duty editing, Adobe Photo Shop is probably the better choice as well.  In any case unless you love the Canon editing software or want to fill up your hard drive, there's no real need to use the software if you are a Mac user.

In terms of printing, you can obviously use your computer to print your pictures.  You can also print directly from your camera if you have a Direct Print compatible printer.  You will need, however, to buy a special cable for this interface.  One additional display option, especially for sharing pictures before you get home, is using a TV.  You can attach the PowerShot with the included RCA jack cable to a TV and give a slide show.

All in all, the PowerShot SD400 is a great camera, both in terms of cost and capabilities.  It gets good marks for everything a still camera ought to do, and gives you decent flexibility to infringe a little bit into the realm of video cameras, too.