Canon PowerShot SX1 IS

8/10 fantastic all-rounder for the price

blooloobooloo - 09/04/09

* This is an exceptional camera. Now don't get me wrong, it's not perfect. It's not the very best camera you can buy, but as an all round package I think it is simply unbeatable for the price. I think the evidence of how good it is, is that no less than 5 of my friends/aquaintances from all over Australia have bought it after seeing it's capabilities (and images) These are the facts. It has 20 times optical zoom, an exceptional image stabilizer, full HD 1080i video with stereo audio, 10 mb. still images, CMOS sensor and a lot more. Its lens is in fact equivalent to 28mm to 560mm. On my first night I went out and took a shot of the moon, hand-held (with optical image stabiliser on) at 1/15 of a second at 20 times zoom (560mm equivalent), It was excellent with great detail including craters! My background is as a Cinematographer but up till now I have had little to do with stills stuff. With my other hat on I am a location scout for feature films, TV commercials etc. and I needed something that was simple and could do virtually anything without any fuss. That includes the ability to take full-res HD video as many Directors now also ask for video footage. It's only issue is that it takes video at 30fps instead of 25fps which is a bit of a pain if you are planning to watch it on your PAL TV instead of your computer. It could easily be fixed if Canon issues a firmware update but so far all such requests have fallen on deaf ears. If it weren't for this I would have given it 9 stars just for its great quality and more importantly, all round versatility.