Also crammed onto the mode dial is a full complement of manual and semi-manual exposure modes. Canon's 'smart auto' option picks an appropriate scene type based on the camera's analysis of faces, brightness, colours, distance and movement. There's also an 'easy' mode for fully automatic shooting with no access to menus whatsoever. There's a 'movie' mode on there, too, but it maxes out at VGA quality, you don't get use of the optical zoom while recording, and there's only mono sound. That's just sad.
Best-in-class photos
Although the SX120 gets decent marks overall for speed, it does have some performance issues. It wakes and shoots in 2.5 seconds, which is typical of superzooms. Its shutter lag for high- and low-contrast scenes -- 0.6 seconds and 0.7 seconds, respectively -- are typical for this class, too. But shot-to-shot times are noticeably slow, at 2.6 seconds without flash, and jump to 6.1 seconds once you enable the flash. Continuous shooting is unimpressive, too, running at 0.8 frames per second.
If there were a reason to pick the SX120 over its competitors, it would be its photo quality, but it doesn't win by much. Noise starts to show at ISO 400, but, up until that point, photos are relatively clean and sharp, with very good detail. At ISO 800, photos have a mottled look, but the loss of detail is still fairly minimal. Even ISO 1,600 photos are usable, as long as you can overlook some colour change from increased noise levels.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
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Shutter lag (typical) |
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David Battaliou 1 June 2011
Comment: You people don't know what you're doing. The camera you feature here is the SX210is, not the SX120is.
eldondetekno 2 November 2009
Good: Excellent user interface and manual controls
Bad: Lens is not wide enough
Comment: Recently I purchased a Canon EOS 450D because I wanted to get more serious about photography, but found the jump from my previous Canon IXUS 860 point and shoot too big a leap. Not withstanding I wanted to preserver and find a camera that could teach how to use manual functions and ease my way in to more complex photography.
The contender to this camera that I was looking at was the Panasonic Lumix L3, as I liked the really wide angle lens and overall design of this camera and the price having dropped considerably. However when having the facility to physically compare both cameras, the way the user menu worked on the Canon Powershot 120IS really made it simple and very intuitive to toggle and tweak all the manual settings and actually see on the screen the effect that changing the ISO, aperture or shutter speed has.
Some draw backs I found that in bright sunlight using the LCD screen it was difficult to correctly asses the right exposure levels, oh I do miss the lack of an optical view finder, which is so prevalent on camera's today.
The pictures are generally very good, and I am surprised at being able to compose really good macro pictures, low light levels with high ISO settings and the pictures when using the zoom are pretty detailed too. I have found that on occasion the pictures are not as sharp as they should be, but that is not always the case and I am stilling a bit of a novice at using manual settings, auto and easy modes generally produce very good results.
On other reviews people have complained about the battery consumption, however having come back from a weekend away I managed to use a quality set of rechargeable batteries for a two day period.
So in summary, great fun and practical to use, with an excellent user interface. This is the reason I bought the camera, had it a wider angle lens, say anything between 24mm to 28mm and some type of either electronic or optical view finder this would have been perfect. As such I will continue to train on this and save for a more complex camera in the future, maybe like the Canon G11 or the new Panasonic Lumix four thirds or Olympus PEN, since I have a feeling that I will out grow this camera soon!
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