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1. Mary Kate says:

   September 5, 2010 at 7:09 am

   Review by Mary Kate for Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
   Rating:
   
   I can’t write an in depth review of this camera because I simply don’t have the knowledge of either cameras or photography. But I can tell you what I, as a rank amateur, like about it and why I chose it.

   I have grandkids. I needed a camera that would allow me to capture decent pictures of them – and in a digital format – so that I can, like all good grandparents, brag about my grandkids via email and attach photos to prove that they are the cutest kids on the face of the earth.

   I had my “good” camera – an old Pentax K1000 that I’ve had for about 30 years – and a small, inexpensive digital camera that I got a few years ago and have never been happy with. Not only was the Pentax not digital, it also turns out that the grandkids can move much faster than I can focus. And that camera purchased as my first attempt at digital just wasn’t cutting it. It was overly complicated and with it I wasn’t getting pictures good enough to share.

   I gave my needs some thought and made the following criteria list:
   
   Easy to use.
   
   Fast shutter speed.
   
   Easy to use.
   
   Small enough to fit into my purse easily.
   
   Easy to use.

   My needs were simple and I didn’t think it would be too hard to find a camera to fit the bill. Happily, I was right.

   After my initial research had convinced me to go with a Canon, I borrowed my brother’s Rebel (don’t know the model number) and my son’s Canon PowerShot Pro Series S5 IS. I knew that neither fit my criteria (not to mention the $500-$700 price range was more than I wanted to spend), but using them for a few days gave me the opportunity to check out some of Canon’s features.

   That’s how I discovered the Optical Image Stabilizer. I can see from reviews of other cameras that it’s been around for a few years, but I’d never used it before. It immediately went to the top of my list of desired features – even above “easy to use”!

   I have a tremor condition that causes fine shaking in my hands. It doesn’t bother me and doesn’t always affect close work, but it can make holding something steady – say, for instance, a camera – almost impossible. As you can guess, the result of that shakiness when snapping photos is, most often, crappy photos.

   Canon’s Optical Image Stabilizer was like a miracle for me. With it, I could take close ups that were startlingly clear – not every time, of course, but MOST times. And, in combination with a fast shutter speed, the Image Stabilizer helped me to get some great shots – even action shots – of my test subject, my dog.

   With my adjusted criteria list, I did some more research that led me to the Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP. One of Canon’s newer models, the PowerShot SX120IS puts ease of use in the forefront of its advertising. It fit all of my criteria and at a decent price.

   I haven’t had this camera for very long, but I’m already thrilled with it. The Easy Mode is actually EASY! What a concept! The LCD screen is larger than what I’ve used previously and makes it easier for me to judge if the picture I just took is relatively clear. The Image Stabilizer continues to be my new best friend.

   Good points:
   
   IMAGE STABLIZER!!
   
   Fast shutter speed
   
   Genuinely easy to use
   
   Small size
   
   Decent price

   Bad points:
   
   I’m so happy with my choice that I can’t think of any right now!

   If I was a serious photographer, I may well have chosen a more comprehensive camera (with all those features and symbols only serious photographers can decipher). But for my level of use and my personal needs, this one does a terrific job and didn’t overly strain the budget. Yeah!

   Recommended.

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2. D Sing says:

   September 5, 2010 at 8:01 am

   Review by D Sing for Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
   Rating:
   I have been debating whether to get a point-and-shoot that is ok, or an SLR that is fantastic. I couldn’t justify spending mega$$$ on an SLR because I’m not that sophisticated a photographer. But I have been unhappy with point-and-shoots that are so slow you miss the picture and that have only a “mini-zoom” feature. But the Canon SX120IS solved it all. First, it’s a lot less expensive than an SLR. And with the image stabilizer and a really fast shutter response time, I can catch the action before it’s over! It takes great close-ups, it has 10X optical zoom, and it has lots of other cool features I can’t wait to learn how to use. Plus the LCD screen is large and the controls are easy to use. My only disappointment is that it has no view finder and in some bright light conditions it is hard to see the screen. But overall, I give it thumbs up!

   OK, now that I’ve used it a while, I have more comments. First the good: I could get it from Amazon and it takes really fantastic pictures in difficult lighting conditions, (see my uploaded images.) Then the not-so-good: it eats batteries, (which I think is true of any camera that uses regular batteries) and the lack of a viewfinder is a bigger pain than I thought. Now I’m reducing the rating and thinking I should have spent a little more and gotten the SX10IS or the newer SX20IS. They have viewfinders, 20X zoom and all the good features i like on the SX120IS.

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3. William Kerney says:

   September 5, 2010 at 8:12 am

   Review by William Kerney for Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
   Rating:
   My needs for a camera are as follows:
   
   1) It needs to fit in my pocket
   
   2) It needs to turn on quickly
   
   3) It needs to shoot “decent enough” photos on auto mode
   
   4) It needs to have enough options to tweak lighting settings.
   
   5) It should have both good indoor and outdoor performance.
   
   6) I’d like something that can do automatic exposure bracketing or otherwise support HDR photography.

   I’ve gone through various cameras over the years, and have borrowed some others to mess around with, and until last week was using a Canon A620, which was a surprisingly good camera, capable of taking shots as good as a DSLR, especially when tweaked correctly. It also could do automatic exposure bracketing for HDR photography when using the CHDK firmware for it. Then I accidentally left my A620 on a bench on South Beach when visiting last week, and so I suddenly found myself in the market for a new camera.

   I was seriously looking into the Fuji 200EXR and the Ricoh CX2 for the HDR photography mode, but they didn’t have the tweakability settings I liked… the 200EXR was great except it always blew out the ISO levels to compensate for its limited image stabilization capabilities, which made auto mode shots almost always unacceptably grainy. I ended up settling on the SX120IS because it matches all my needs except for HDR photography. That, I’ll hold off on until a new generation or two of HDR cameras has come and gone.

   It has very good low-light performance, as long as you’re willing to put up with a certain amount of graininess Indoors, with the curtains drawn and just a couple normal lamps lighting the living room, it was able to take quite decent photos at ISO200. Without a flash. The IS was quite helpful in this regard, and the only downside was that the image had a noticeable level of noise in it. This will bother some people. Myself – I’m happy that it doesn’t do what most P&S cameras do, which is reduce the shutter speed to such a low level that everything blurs into nothingness. This is rather the opposite – quite crisp images with no blur, but you pay for it with a little bit of noise. I’m fine with that, really. I never carry a tripod, instead carrying it around in my pocket whenever I travel, and I like to be able to whip it out and photograph something on the spot, indoors or out.

   The camera turns on quite quickly, and the auto mode does a generally decent job for taking those quick shots that would otherwise pass you by (the bird posing on the branch). The camera also has a the right amount of manual settings for tweaking your shots just the way you want them. (Another poster on here complained it was too complicated for him, and I suppose that could be a fair criticism, but for me it’s the right level of complexity.) Like with my other Canon, it allows you to tweak ISO, aperture priority, time priority, or all three, as well as something the A620 couldn’t do – a manual focus setting, which has been quite fun to play around with.

   As far as all the vaunted features on this camera (auto face recognition, Digic 4, etc.), I didn’t really notice it taking photos noticeably different from my A620. Image quality was about the same with the experimentation I did replicating several shots around the neighborhood. However, since I had no complaints about the A620, this is not a criticism. The one thing I do miss, though, is the flip out viewfinder. I much prefer a viewfinder that can flip around for self-portraits, or flip backwards to protect itself over the always-out LCD viewfinders which always get scratched up very quickly. But all of them are that way nowadays, so I am not really complaining that much about it.

   All in all, a great camera.

   Edit: After more experience with the camera (I’ve taken several thousand shots with this camera in different settings now), I have an update to this review.
   
   1) The SD card is very inconveniently located under the unwieldy battery door – I much prefer separate memory card doors on my cameras, so I can pop it out and into a computer easily.

   2) The smallish sensor size is not fully compensated for with the IS system. It has the noise of my previous camera at two ISO settings higher, and the auto mode tends to take shots in much higher ISO settings than needed, meaning you need to manually control the ISO mode most of the time, which is a minor annoyance.

   3) The zoom lens on this camera rocks. Much better than most P&S camera zoom lenses. It makes a 100 yard shot look like it is 10 feet away, with no visible distortion or chromatic aberration. Macro shots also look very nice.

   4) At first I was annoyed by the wheel on the back of the camera, since it would tend to move when trying to push up or down, but it does make browsing through lots of old photos a snap.

   5) I’ve seen some people complaining about the fact that the SX120IS has a manual pop-up flash, whereas the higher level SX200IS model (which my father has, and I’ve used) automatically pops up the flash when you turn the camera on. However, believe me when I say that I greatly prefer the manual popup – it means you never take a flash photo when you don’t want to. And flash sucks for a lot of shots since it wipes out depth in a photo and annoys people, like curators at museum. The camera knows the flash is disabled, and sets its properties accordingly. You can manually disable flash on other cameras, but if you set those cameras to auto mode, a lot of models will automatically re-enable the flash. With this camera, it’ll never happen. I love it.

   6) I don’t quite like the form factor on the camera. It seems easier to drop than other Canons that I’ve used.

   7) Being able to turn on auto-histograming and zebra highlighting over- and under-exposed parts of a photo on every shot out of the box is a very nice feature. I used to have to use CHDK to enable that on my older Canon.

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4. Hey Mo!! says:

   September 5, 2010 at 8:33 am

   Review by Hey Mo!! for Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
   Rating:
   I was looking for the best zoom with image-stabilization in the under-$200 category and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. In addition, I got what seems to be the smartest camera in its class. Unfortunately, the people who designed it were thinking more about getting the images onto the camera than getting the images off. It doesn’t mount as a USB mass-storage device and the bundled software is total “poo.” It’s a good camera, but save yourself a headache and get a card reader if you don’t have one already.

   I paid about $20 less than Amazon’s price for this camera, which put it in the same price range as a typical 3x-zoom pocket Panasonic, Pentax or Kodak camera, but IMHO it’s better than any of those and way better than the Olympus cameras I’ve tried that cost more. Some of those other cameras will be 12-megapixels while this one’s a “mere” 10MP, but don’t buy into the megapixel myth.

   *_Pros:
   
   10x optical zoom for the price of a 3x zoom camera. The image-stabilization makes it a snap to get great pics while zoomed to the max.

   Picture quality is very nice. With decent lighting there’s little noise, banding or color-shifting, even at the edges of the images where other cameras tend to sneak it in. Indoors, in Auto mode there’s some fine noise in the red and green channels that’s easily detectable, but about on-par with cameras in this price-range.

   The Auto setting gets you shooting high quality pictures in a hurry. About 2 seconds from power-on to the first shot.

   If, like me, you love to fiddle, this thing offers lots of manual settings. ISO, WB, manual focus, aperture control, custom exposure time up to 15 seconds… The Manual settings are especially useful for indoor and macro shots.

   People complain about the camera eating batteries. The cheap batteries that it came with were depleted before I’d finished reviewing the controls, but with Energizer Titaniums I easily got at least 250 shots — some with flash — before the batteries ran down. I haven’t tried Lithium yet.

   The little battery used just for keeping time. Sometimes I leave my camera shelved for a month or two and with previous cameras I’d have to set the time and date and other presets all over again. This camera: No pain.

   Duplicating images and some tweaking including red-eye correction can done be while browsing images in Playback mode instead of at the time of the shot.

   The camera can be set to display detailed image data including a histogram when a picture is displayed at the time that it’s shot and also later in the Preview mode.

   Pop-up flash with fine flash controls.

   Uses standard AA batteries. No proprietary charger to deal with.

   I honestly don’t know that the auto face recognition does anything to improve my picture-taking, but it’s fun to play with when you’ve got lots of people in a shot and the time to fuss around.

   …

   *_Cons:
   
   While the manual says that the camera’s memory card will mount on a Mac or PC using the supplied USB cable, I’ve found that it simply doesn’t work and a little Googling confirmed that this is an epic fail for almost all Canon cameras. The camera is detected on the USB bus, but it’s never mounted as a mass-storage device. I’ve got a card reader so it isn’t a big deal, but it’s annoying. Notably, if you lack a card-reader and if you’ve got a Mac, Apple’s Image Capture software — bundled with the OS — detects the camera and lets you copy the images anywhere on your drive quite efficiently. This is in contrast to…

   The “Camera Window” software that Canon wants you to use to get images and movies off of the memory card is one of the most stupid inefficient pieces of crud ever to pollute my computer. It has almost no configurable options, shows thumbnails but doesn’t allow a user to simply drag and drop images to the Desktop or to a convenient folder and forces the user to import the images into an awful awful awful proprietary image-catalog application. Whoever decided to push this lousy software on us deserves to be tarred and feathered and publicly flogged. I just want the memory card on my camera to mount on my computer so that I can copy my pictures to wherever the heck I want and decide for myself how I want my images cataloged. Almost every digital camera did that 10 years ago. Why is it so hard for modern camera-makers to do this?!!

   WB suffers a lot indoors when using the Auto mode without the flash.

   The camera’s display tends to make images look brighter and more saturated than they actually are. Plan accordingly.

   Continuous shooting has a delay of about a second between shots. It should be faster.

   When shooting video, the WB and ISO seem to be stuck at whatever setting they are at when the camera starts recording so moving from a bright room to a darker room makes for color-shifts and noise.

   Also when shooting video, the optical zoom is stuck at whatever setting you had when you started recording. You can’t zoom out from there and zooming in from that point is digital-only and adds noise.

   …

   *_Nit-Picking:
   
   The plastic case makes it seem like this camera is low-end when it just ain’t.

   The battery compartment can be hard to open. There should be some grooves in the battery-door to help you get the traction to slide the door out to the position where it swings open. I’ve found a trick to doing it with minimal effort: Move the little button with your fingernail, then keep your fingernail in the slot and push with the edge of your nail towards the side of the camera to slide the battery-door out to the point where it can swing open.

   Movies are shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio (640×480, AVI, MJPEG compression with raw 8-bit/11KHz mono audio). They are generally of excellent quality — good enough to stand in for a camcorder in a pinch — but modern devices should shoot in 16:9 instead of 4:3. Oddly, VLC reports encoding errors in the movie files, but QuickTime 7 has no problem with them.

   It’s not really big or heavy, but this is not a camera that can easily fit in a pants-pocket. It does fit in the inside pocket on some of my coats. I actually went out and got a little camera case with a belt-loop and shoulder-strap for mine so I don’t have to worry about it dangling from my wrist when I’m not using it.

   The big white wrist strap that mine came with is ugly. I replaced it with a svelte gray strap from another camera.

   The PhotoStitch software that it comes with crashes instantly under Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. I didn’t buy it for the cheezy software, but if you want to make panaramas be warned.

   The images are saved at 180dpi. I’ve noticed this with other Canon cameras. I can see a rationale for 72 dpi. I can see 96 or 244 or 300dpi. Why 180dpi? I know that it’s arbitrary and largely meaningless, but that number is just weird.

   I wish this camera would save pictures in LZW TIFF or RAW format. I hate JPEG.

   …

   Okay, so you’ve read this far and you see lots of criticisms. I still recommend this camera. It takes good pictures, it’s got a great zoom with some of the best image-stabilization I’ve seen and the interface is suitable for both the neophyte and the advanced amateur user. It’s a sweet camera and the price is fantastic for what you get. If you want better, you’re going to end up paying a lot more.

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5. RLSd says:

   September 5, 2010 at 9:24 am

   Review by RLSd for Canon PowerShot SX120IS 10MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Images Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
   Rating:
   The Canon Sx120 is for the advanced photographer who wants more control than the typical digital camera, but without the extra bulk or price. I got this camera after having used the previous SX100 and Sx110 and some DSLRs. The main upgrade from the past is the DIGIC IV processor and the noise reduction at ISO 800 and 1600. In the previous SX models the noise was pretty bad, specks of odd color pixels were very obvious at high ISO, but with the SX120′s new NR processing, it’s a noticeable improvement. Granted it’s not DSLR level, but very usable for a compact digital camera. All the other features are just minor tweaks from the previous models.

   This is a great camera for the money. It allows manual operation of aperture, shutter speed, even flash intensity (which comes in useful for optically triggering off-camera flashes). I wish more compact cameras allowed this kind of control for creative shooting. The aperture operation isn’t like some other manufacturers that only have 2 settings, wide and small. It actually has increments in 1/3 stop steps which gives great control. One other feature you can’t find in any other value compact digital camera is how fast the lens is. I mean how much light it lets in even when zoomed in (f2.8-f4.3). This allows faster shutter speeds to freeze the action in dimly lit areas. Most cameras have tiny lenses that lets even less light through when zoomed in, this makes the camera turn up the ISO (more noise), or slows the shutter speed (more blur). The Canon SX120 has a big enough lens to counter these effects. Even the new Canon SX200 has compromised in this area of the lens.

   Other nice features of this camera I like are being able to adjust contrast, saturation, and sharpness of images. I prefer to turn these down as much as possible to capture the most data at first, I can post-process the pictures later on a computer if I wanted (alternative when RAW isn’t availble).

   This camera has so many great little things about it. I’ll just list them here for completeness sake. It has great image quality, a lot of control for the user, intuitive interface, adequate performance speed for the category, uses convenient & greener AA batteries. I just have a few minor gripes that would make this an even better camera:

   1) Super-fine JPG mode is not available anymore, I wish the JPG compression was more adjustable.

   2) The Zoom level is not precisely displayed. I prefer an equivalent focal length display instead of an ambiguous zoom bar that only appears for a second or two when the zoom is activated.

   3) Flash recharge is slow, but it’s to be expected since it uses AA batteries. This really isn’t so bad since I don’t use flash very much because the camera is able to take good photos in low-light with the big lens and good high ISO performance along with the optical image stabilizer. I get good performance out of the camera using slow-discharge NiMH batteries (don’t get the high mAH rating ones, they have a high self-discharge rate).

   4) There’s no way to turn off the auto-lens retraction when playing back images, which resets the settings when I turn the camera back on to shoot again (I have to readjust my zoom level and exposure compensation settings for example.)

   5) Wide-angle isn’t very wide at 36mm EFL, I prefer a bit wider and give up some in the telephoto end, while keeping the same lens performance.

   6) Video recording is ok (640×480 in mJPEG), optical zoom disabled while recording. I dont’ take a lot of videos and figured this camera is really for taking creative still photos. So it’s an ok compromise for me.
   

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