I bought Canon SD770 camera for $300. The body has big engraving on the front: 10.0 MEGA PIXELS. Call me naive, but I expected this camera to produce 10 megapixel photographs! AS advertised. That would be a technical achievement to accomplish this with the lens as small as a shirt button. And all this for only $300? I tested it for a week doing a few hundreds images in different conditions. I promptly loaded pictures into my computer and tried to see them at 1:1 size on my 27" monitor. No surprise, no glory, just fuzzy image. Obviously the lens is not capable of resolving the resolution needed by an image sensor. I returned the camera for a full refund and made a fuss about being ripped off. Does Canon marketeers think of us that we are all stupid? Stupid enough to figure out that 10 is bigger than 8 so 10 meg camera is better than 5 meg? I understand that this camera has 10 meg sensor, but when I buy a camera... I expect to make pictures with it, not brag to my friends that "my is bigger than yours"
The good:
Six months later I saw this camera for $200. I bought it and use it as a pocket camera. It is NOT 10 megapixel camera, but for $200 it makes good pictures to watch on 1920x1080 TV screen. The DIGIC image processor very well exposes pictures even in difficult situations. For example taking a picture of a bronze statue against a white cloudy sky. The camera allows to see the detail in the dark subject ignoring very strong background light. The face recognition produces good exposure and good skin tones of people in the picture. Even image stabilization is helpfull. Buuilt-in flash produces well exposed images and excellent skin tones.
It is a waste for the processor to process 10 megapixels of nonexisting information in the picture. This camera would be very good with 6-7 megapixel sensor. The penalty for high pixel count is the noise in the picture and long times of image procesing.
| visual design | 5 | excellent (silver model only) |
| engineering | 5 | excellent |
| ergonomics | 4 | good |
| marketing | 0 | misleading |
Conclusion: hats off to Canon engineers, damn with Canon marketeers.
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