The new SD850 doesn’t have the ‘door opens if you look at it funny’ problem of the first one, so I apparently got an assembly line reject. Don’t know how that happened, but it is about par for the course when it comes to me and buying nice stuff. Anywho, I’d rate the door on the new one at about 4/10, so it’s still not great, but it’s no longer a showstopping bewilderment.
I still need to get some outdoor images with it, as all the shots I’ve taken thus far have been indoors. That said, it’s a bit grainy w/o the flash on, even as low as ISO 250, which is a bit weird. It does take painfully long to take shots with the flash and image stabilization turned on, but then again it is a point-and-shoot so I can’t be too picky. I need to start carrying it absolutely everywhere, as I intend to do in country, as I’ve already missed 2 occasions where having the camera would have been cool. One with about 70+ birds sitting on some power lines, and another which will remain secret for now (pictures will follow when I get back to the to remain nameless location).
The controls are not immediately intuitive to repeat Canon owners (such as myself), as some of them have been moved / modified fairly significantly. The functions remain available, but how you get to them has changed. There isn’t a selection dial position for ‘sports’, ‘portrait’, ‘night-time’, etc, these have been replaced by a single SCN selection, within which the mode is selected via the FUNC SET button on the back of the camera. It does remember which mode you last picked, so you’ve basically got Auto, Manual, SCN, and Video as selectable modes, with each selection’s setting being remembered between wheel switch events. Like I said, not as intuitive as before, but still not too bad. Video quality is good, however the size of video files is pretty large, meaning I’ll have to run pretty much everything through Windows Movie Maker to get the file sizes manageable.
Overall, the experience has been fair to middling, and highlights my perpetual inability to remain emotionally uninvolved in these things. Sample photo uploads to come soon, after I get back where I have a reasonable upload speed.
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