We love the design on Canon's new 8-megapixel point-and-shoot, but are its pictures up to snuff? Get the answer in our in-depth Canon SD1100 IS review.
Review summary of the Canon Powershot SD1100 IS:
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 The Canon SD1100 IS is a superbly designed camera with a style that looks great and, even better, actually makes the camera easier to use. We loved the inclusion of an optical viewfinder - long the holy grail of compact cameras features here at infoSync - even if it's only a pinhole viewfinder and not truly optical. It's still a lot better than an electronic one. Still, the SD1100 IS isn't quite feature rich, but it makes up for that with great image quality, particularly in its deep color-rendering. For those who prefer good images over niftiness, the SD1100 IS could be a good choice. Release: March 2008. Price: $150.
Pros: Excellent design. Pinhole viewfinder. Great image quality.
Cons: Small LCD screen. Slight problems with fringing. Not a feature-set dynamo.
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Full Canon Powershot SD1100 IS Review:
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Design - Excellent
Canon has gone the extra mile in separating the Canon SD1100 IS from the pack, giving it a streamlined exterior and a contoured body that not only looks great, but makes the camera easier to hold. Our review unit was also an earthy red, a pleasing differentiation from the pewter tones of a typical point-and-shoot.
The twist zoom around the shutter release is a bit small, and a wheel on the four-way controller would have been nice. Otherwise we have no complaints, as the Canon SD1100 IS takes the standard compact layout and does no wrong. Shortcuts are available for most everything important, and Canon has included a helpful toggle for switching between camera, video and playback modes.
Best of all, and what particularly ingratiated the design to us, is the optical viewfinder above the LCD screen. Granted, it's not the same thing as an optical viewfinder on a DSLR – there's no system of mirrors to let you literally look through the lens – but a pinhole viewfinder like the one found in the Canon SD1100 IS will give you an unfiltered look at what's in the camera's frame. That said, keep in mind that pinhole viewfinders suffer from mild parallax issues (your eye is a few centimeters above the lens, so the geometry of what you're seeing is slightly different from how the photograph will look).
Interface - Very good
No surprises here: the interface on the Canon SD1100 IS is largely identical to what we've seen on Canon's other point-and-shoots, and it still works just as well. The function button accesses shooting parameters like white balance and JPEG compression, as well as a toggle for the camera's various shooting modes. The menu button accesses the system menu, which offered all of the settings we expected.
At 2.5-inches, the LCD viewfinder is somewhat undersized, but it offers a clear image at a good resolution. Low light performance is average, as the LCD remains responsive in dark scenarios, but gain distortion is visible and can be distracting (another reason it's a boon to have an optical viewfinder). This is true of most LCD screens, so it's not a heavy mark against the Canon SD1100 IS.
Features - Good
The Canon SD1100 IS isn't overloaded with features. It's not brimming with megapixels, it doesn't have stratospheric zooming, and it doesn't have a super wide-angle lens. Still, it does have one of the most important features to good image-quality – an optical image-stabilizer – and it has standard compact assists like face detection.
It also features an intelligent auto-mode that analyzes lighting conditions and subject movement, which should further reduce blurry camera-shake, as well as a continuous shooting mode. We also liked the inclusion of delayed shutter with a custom timer, so the user can specify just how long he or she wants the camera to wait before taking an exposure.
ISO speeds are selectable and range from 80 to 1600, with a 'HI' preset that automatically selects high sensitivities for shooting in dark environments. Canon has also bundled their 'color swap' and 'color accent' shooting modes; the former swaps one color for another in-camera, and the latter retains one color but renders the rest as black-and-white. These features are easily controlled in the interface: simply select the mode, point the camera at whatever color you want to swap or accent, and then press the display key to select that color.
Image quality - Very good
The Canon SD1100 IS takes great photographs for a compact, 8-megapixel camera. Lines are clean and colors are very well rendered. We'd recommend it as a solid choice for when you need a small camera that can fit in your pocket, like a day around town or a vacation to a colorful, tropical getaway. Images come out looking rich and colorful, and even in full auto-mode the Canon SD1100 IS did a nice job with no fuss.
Noise management is good across the board. Distortion is visible at ISO-400, distracting at 800 and quite dense at 1600, but even the maximum sensitivity remains usable. The character of the SD1100 IS's noise is also less ugly than most digital blocking. It seems Canon has taken some steps in making noise distortion appear more like film grain.
Scene test #1
Scene test #2
These two scene samples are superb and particularly show off the SD1100's excellent color rendering. The sky in the background, the foliage in the right corner and the red lettering at the bottom are all deeply saturated but still accurate. There is a slight loss of focus along the sides, and some edges are affected by fringing, but neither instance is serious.
Edge test #1
Edge test #2
The camera also did a good job in these two edge tests, both taken in difficult lighting. The first shot is especially impressive, as the Canon SD1100 IS extracted as much detail from the leaves as any 10-megapixel camera we've seen. Some fringing is evident along edges, but overall sharpness is high.
[Context]
Macro
The Canon SD1100 IS also has excellent macro capabilities. This shot is with the camera nearly flush against the subject, yet detail and color performance are still high. There is focus loss on the left and right edges (the defocus on the top and bottom is the correct result of a shallow depth-of-field), but this is typical of small, consumer lenses.
Color accent [green]
Color swap [green -> blue]
Finally, we took samples with the 'color accent' and 'color swap' features. Both appear to use a concept called 'chroma-keying', a system that detects and alters only certain color values in an image; this is the same process used for blue and green-screen effects in movies. They're both fun features, and they both work as advertised. The first sample is 'green accented', such that only the grass is colored. It's not perfect – it never is, and it remains notoriously tricky even in professional studios – but the Canon SD1100 IS did a good job of weeding out the wrong colors and preserving green, even if a few yellows and blues crop up throughout the picture. The second is a sample of green 'swapped' for blue, which leads to more psychotropic results.
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