Believe it or not, the SD870IS PowerShot by Canon is one of their best sellers ever, both online, and through bricks and mortar retailers. This PowerShot has a nice compact size, image stabilization, face detection, nice video quality and a generously sized 3 inch LCD screen. But with a lot of products, you need to look a little closer, to find the imperfections. If your even considering buying a Canon PowerShot SD870IS Digital Camera, there are a few negative points you need to be aware of.
Taking good indoor pictures can be the bane of many point and shoot cameras in this price range, and the Canon SD870IS unfortunately is no exception. While outdoors, with plenty of natural light, the SD870IS (as well as just about every camera) takes very nice photos. Great color, high image quality, and well lit. But indoors is another story. The camera seems to have a hard time deciding when would be an appropriate time to use the flash. This quite often results in an overexposed subject, with a background that seems bathed in shadows.
Canon also made the unfortunate decision with the PowerShot SD870IS to exclude an optical viewfinder. I've seen a lot of point and shoot cameras move in this direction, and it's a real pet peeve for me. Having an optical viewfinder on a camera is not a big expense, and actually gives the consumer more choice in how he or she takes pictures. With more pressure on the manufactures to provide larger LCD screens, the viewfinder is being sacrificed. Being able to use a viewfinder to frame your pictures when your batteries are being sucked dry by over-sized LCD screens, and an undersized battery capacity is a nice option.
A few other complaints with the Canon SD870IS Digital include:
- less than stellar results at high ISO settings
- exposure setting is non adjustable
- far too many photos exhibit red eye subjects
- shooting videos restricts manual adjustments of focus and zoom settings
