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Canon is having a good year with its PowerShot and Ixus cameras. Much of it is down to its 12-megapixel back-illuminated sensor, which appears yet again in the SX230 HS and helps it deliver the best photos we’ve ever seen from a pocket-sized ultra-zoom camera.
Noise levels were incredibly low, with brightly lit shots resembling an SLR’s output. Low-light shots were a little soft on detail but looked smoother and cleaner than its rivals.
This telephoto shot in shady conditions pushes up the ISO speed to 1600 to avoid blur, but noise remains impressively low while still maintaining a reasonable amount of detail
The lens pulls its weight, too, with sharp focus into the corners of frames throughout its 14x zoom range. There were some chromatic aberrations around high-contrast lines, but not enough to compromise focus in other parts of the image.
There’s a hint of chromatic aberrations, but otherwise, details in bright light are crisp without resorting to excessive digital sharpening
The 28-392mm (equivalent) focal length range isn’t as flexible as with many of its rivals, but superior focus and low noise meant the SX230 HS was just as capable at resolving detail in distant subjects as the 18x Nikon S9100 and even the 24x Olympus SZ-30MR.
There’s the full complement of priority and manual exposure modes and manual focus. Their implementation is first rate, with the navigation pad doubling as a wheel for quickly adjusting settings. Standard shot-to-shot times were a little slow at 2.2 seconds apart but the 0.9fps continuous mode with updating autofocus makes up for it for those who like to fire off a string of shots. Continuous shooting with static focus was at 2.1fps until the card was full.
The 3in screen’s wide aspect ratio means photos appear smaller than on squarer screens, but it comes into its own for video capture. Video quality was superb, with a sharp 1080p picture, crisp stereo sound and smooth autofocus. The zoom and focus motors where picked up by the microphone but only in very quiet scenes. The 16-minute maximum clip length is more disappointing but we could live with it.
There’s a GPS radio for geotagging photos so you can plot them on a map in Google Picasa and various other photo managers. If this doesn’t appeal, go for the SX220 HS, which lacks this feature, is otherwise identical and costs £178 at Amazon. That’s a stunningly good deal, but both models are fantastic value for such capable, high quality cameras.
