Canon PowerShot SD3500IS Digital Camera Review
Product At-a-Glance
- Great image quality.
- Responsive touch screen.
- Built-in HDMI output.
- Slow shooting performance.
- Hard to open port doors.
The PowerShot SD3500IS has a great touch interface, a nice feature set and decent image quality, but it suffers from slow shooting performance.
Full Review
Touch screen technology is becoming more available and is in more devices than ever before. Companies are finding new ways of interacting with their devices. Today we're taking a look at the Canon PowerShot SD3500 IS, a digital camera with a touch screen. But is Canon focusing too much on the experience instead of the quality? Find out after the break.
The PowerShot SD3500IS is a 14 megapixel point-and-shoot camera, weighing 5.6 ounces, and relatively compact. It packs in a 5x optical zoom equivalent to a 24-120mm 35mm lens. It also shoots 720p high definition video that can be output through the camera's built-in HDMI port for connecting to a HDTV. On the side of the camera are two small doors to access the USB and HDMI ports. They are somewhat hard to open with your finger though. The highlight of this camera is obviously the 3.5-inch touch screen on the back, and that's the only thing that's on the back of the camera. No buttons here except the power, playback, mode switch and shutter release button at the top.
The screen is one of the best touch screens I've used, the other being the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. It's responsive and doesn't need much of a tap to do anything unlike other (cheaper) screens where sensitivity is an issue. Canon allows you to use the screen to control a variety of different things besides the menu options. Touch AF allows you to focus on a certain object just by tapping on it and you can flick through images, just like the iPhone. Canon also includes a feature dubbed Active Display technology for advancing images by tapping the camera and tilting it.
The camera offers several unique shooting modes including Smart Auto, which selects the proper settings based on different shooting situations. In our tests, this worked wonderfully. Try and get a closeup of an object and the camera switches to macro mode for getting the perfect image. One of the other unique modes is Miniature Mode, similar to the tilt-shift effect but produced in-camera by blurring the top and bottom of the image.
There are several others including Color Swap and Color Accent which have become staples of the PowerShot lineup and favorites of consumers. Another set of modes is the Smart Shutter feature, which includes a Smile, Wink and Face Detection self-timer, all triggering the shutter release when one smiles, winks, or new faces are detected. Low Light mode allows you to utilize the ISO 6400 setting of the camera for capturing the moment in situations without much light available. The pictures are somewhat usable, but if all you care about is capturing something, it's there for you.
Performance while shooting pictures isn't something to write home about, however. Time between shots is around 2.6 seconds without flash and around 4.1 seconds with the flash. Not the best if you're trying to capture a fast moving subject. Color and exposure performance is excellent, along with the HD video quality that rivals a Flip Mino HD or similar camera.
All in all, the Canon PowerShot SD3500IS is a decent camera with a strong emphasis on touch screen controls, but it does fall short in shooting performance. If the touch screen is really important to you and the creative features are what you want, go for it.
The Canon PowerShot SD3500IS is available from Canon's website as well as Amazon.com where it retails for $299.99 in black, silver and pink.
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