Canon Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS

Reviewed by: pleonastic

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: - Very compact- Stability control works great- Takes great pictures with no effort

Weaknesses: - Separate charger for battery

Overall Evaluation: Overall, I'm really impressed with this camera. I'm not a professional photographer by any means, but the pictures I'm taking are coming out great.When I was looking for a camera, I had two primary criteria:1. It had to be small and durable enough to carry around without me wanting to leave it at home because it was too big or fragile.2. It had to be able to consistently take good pictures without me changing a bunch of settings for each shot.The SD1100 hits home on both of those marks. It's very small and light, less than half the size of the old Canon S400 Digital Elph that I used to use. The build quality is great. You can toss this in your pants pocket without it becoming a nuisance or having to worry about it getting broken while you move around.One thing to note in particular is that the image stabilization feature is fantastic. I took a bunch of pictures during a helicopter tour of Hawaii last week, and as you can imagine a helicopter is not the most stable platform to take pictures from. My old camera without stabilization would have taken a ton of blurry pictures because I wouldn't have been able to hold it still long enough. The SD1100 worked like a charm and every one of my pictures came out clear. This feature alone will make the difference between good and bad pictures for the vast majority of amateurs like myself.On the down side, the camera comes with an external charger for its battery. While the charger itself is very compact (much smaller than the camera), it's still another thing to remember to take with you. It would have been nice to have just been able to charge the battery inside the camera via USB.