Yes, the clever Canon Powershot SD50 (Canon Powershot SD500 actually!) knows which side is up, and when to start getting ready for the next shot, all the while flaunting those never-ending curves...
It isn't unexpected to find a well-designed Canon - there are many beautiful ones out there - but the Canon Powershot SD50 with its "perpetual curves" design is surely something to behold - and to hold! This body design means there are very few right angles or even flat surfaces to be found, which also gives it a natural and smooth feel in the hand.
The Intelligent Orientation Sensor is able to rotate vertical shots automatically, and knows when to wake this Canon Digital Camera SD50 out of sleep mode by detecting movement when the body is picked up.
On the speed front the Canon Powershot SD50 is deemed to be one of the quickest point-and-shoots. The DIGIC II processor doesn't let the grass grow: it makes very quick work of start-up, shot-to-shot performance is excellent, and the fast processor makes for very snappy play-back times.
A useful feature incorporated into the new enlarged and bright 2.0" LCD (with 118,000 pixels) is a "Night Display" setting which brightens the screen in low light conditions.
Image quality is always a potentially contentious issue, with beauty in the eyes of the beholder to a great extent. However, many user reviews indicate a high level of satisfaction with the Canon Powershot SD50: images are deemed bright and sharp, and very little distortion. Purple fringeing also seems to be at acceptable levels for a camera in this class.
The Canon Powershot SD50 is not a professional camera: manual controls are limited to white balancing and shutter speed, and the user is unable to change the aperture or shutter speed settings. There is also no support for RAW and TIFF formats.
But then there are enough quality features to keep the adventurous point-and-shooter occupied for a long while...
An example is the movie feature: the Canon Powershot SD50 sports an unlimited continuous shooting mode which lets you keep shooting at about two frames per second until the memory card is full!
Movies are generally shot in 640 x 480 at 30fps, with a fast frame rate (320 x 240 pixels) of 60fps.
And if you're in a hurry to show off that perfect shot there's a nice play-back feature called, well... "Jump" which lets you skip ahead 10 images.
Finally, this camera won't disappoint in the battery-life department. The lithium-ion battery performs very well (a real improvement on preceding Canon models), and gives the Canon Powershot SD50 (Canon Powershot SD500) enough power to work its way through more than 1000 images...
