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Canon Powershot SX20 IS Complete Review

Canon Powershot SX20 IS Review

Canon Powershot SX20 IS is one of the longzoom compact camera you can find right now. Being one of the new Canon camera, the SX20 is designed to succeed Canon’s achievement with its predecessor (SX10). Featuring its 20x Optical Zoom and 12 Megapixels CCD sensor, SX20 is ready to accompany those who need a better point and shoot camera to accompany their travels.

Powershot SX20 IS Design and Build

Looking on its exterior, you’ll might notice that SX20 doesn’t differ much than SX10 (speaking of dimension and weight), except the HDMI port that taking some space on the right side. Having the dimension of 4.88×3.48×3.42, the size of SX20 is bigger than any regular pocket camera. But I guess, its great features make up for that. 

Canon SX20 IS Controls, Menus and Modes

I thought that Canon SX20’s design is pretty ergonomic for me. You’ll get a good grip with your left hand, especially with some rubber portion that strengten your grip on this camera. The buttons are easily reachable by your right thumbs, but Canon smartly designed the buttons in the back so our thumbs doesn’t mess up with them when we take our photos.

Canon SX20 IS menus were pretty easy to understand, and you can have a hint displayed for you when you still not familiar with it. SX20 provides us with 13 primary shootings mode like Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Night snapshot, Sports, Special Scene, and Stitch Assist when you don’t feel like doing all the manual settings for a certain scene. But when you’re on the mood to play a little bit with your Powershot SX20, you can choose these settings

• Program AE (P) : this mode let us select ISO Levels, Exposure and White Balance settings, and let the camera do the aperture and shutter speed settings.
• Shutter Priority (Tv) : in this mode, we can set shutter speed, and let our camera sets aperture and we can select other setting’s from it range.
• Aperture Priorty (Av) :in this mode, we can set aperutre, and let our camera sets shutter speed and we can select other setting’s from it range.
• Manual (M) : we can set both, the aperture and shutter speed, and select other settings from it range. It is useful when you want to get a hold of more controls of your camera.
• Custom (C) : this modes will save your personal settings you frequently used and set it to be available anytime you need.

Canon Powershot SX20 IS Display / Viewfinder

Speaking about display screen, Canon SX20 is a little bit of not following the trends of bigger LCD display (2.7 inch and above). Fortunately, SX20 display can be swinged 180 degrees and rotated 270 degrees, giving you flexibilties when taking your shots in a crowded and distant places. The viewfinder is one factor I like too, because sometimes it really help me to focus on my object better than using SX20 display screen

Canon Powershot SX20 IS Performance Review
This camera have a very good shutter lag (approx 0.02 sec), Auto Focus Acquision (approx 0.4 sec) and able to do continuous shooting at 1.1fps at ful resolution. SX 20 have a flash range at 22 ft (wide angle) and 12 ft (telephoto). SX20 IS have 20x Optical Zoom and 12 Megapixels CCD sensor. It also equipped with Optical Image Stabilization to minimize photo blurs due to handshake. The telephoto images produced with Canon SX20 IS shows some distorion in the edges.

SX20 IS Digic 4 works quite well to deliver vibrant colors in your images. And, if you’re not quite satisfied with this Canon Powershot auto settings, you can utilize custom colors settings in your SX20. The noise in high ISO settings became prominent starting at ISO 400 above. But one thing special from this SX20 is its HD video recording capability that enables you record in 720p with a very good quality compared to several other cameras.

Conclusion

With Canon Powershot SX20 IS faster AF acquition, shorter shutter lag, increased flash range and bigger megapixels compared to SX10. I guess this SX20 is a pretty valuable camera. The video made with this digital camera was also pretty good as far as I know. I even thank Canon for making this Canon SX20 IS

SX20 IS Canon Digital Camera Review