Supercop007’s Blog

Most of you probably know that I’ve been the photographer for the Princeton Chinese Language School in Princeton, NJ for the last two and a half years, but recently (for my birthday) I decided to upgrade my camera for the first time.  My current photos were actually being taken with my brother’s Canon Powershot A610, but I’ve owned my Canon Powershot A85 since 2005 (and his A70 since 2003).  I was originally targeting the popular Canon Digital Rebel XSi, but considering the price range for just the body and the kit lens, I felt it just wasn’t the time to make a huge jump upward to a DSLR.  Actually one of the main weaknesses of the Powershot A series for me was that the zoom was not any more than 4x optical zoom and I couldn’t get a close-up enough photo a lot of the time.  This is where my new camera comes in, the Canon Powershot SX10 IS.

I hadn’t even known about the S line of Powershot cameras before my dad showed me the model at the Best Buy just before Christmas.  Apparently the S line (and now SX) is Canon’s line of “super-zoom” bridge cameras which debuted in 2004 with the S1 IS containing a 10x zoom, but to my surprise the current model (SX10) sports an even larger zoom at 20x.  The purpose is supposed to be to sit between the normal point and shoot cameras and the DSLR cameras as sort of an all-in-one solution.  Besides the insane zoom lens (which equals 28mm to 560mm on the standard 35mm lens scale), it retains all the neat features of the A-line like the flip-out screen and ability to take AA batteries, but also incorporates typical DSLR features like the flash hot shoe, full manual control (f-stop and aperture control), and a digital viewfinder.

Since I haven’t actually gotten a chance to do an event for the Chinese school yet, I only have a couple indoor shots so far.  I’ll see if I can get a few outdoor shots tomorrow to stick on here to give a little better representation of what it can do.  Anyway the first shot above is a 0x zoom shot from my desk to the whiteboard while the second is a 20x zoom shot focusing on one of the magnets I put on there.  The third shot is my Xbox 360 I took from across the family room (about 10 feet away) at 20x zoom.  So far I’m pretty impressed about the entire product.  The price was really reasonable at $324 from Amazon.com and far less than what I was expecting considering all the features they pack in there.  Especially since stacking the price of the XSi with a telephoto lens would run me about $850 (and would weigh more and take up lots of space), I’m happy.  Of course I know that the image quality is technically never going to reach the potential of a DSLR, but I’ll leave that as my next step up down the line since I haven’t yet learned how to master the point and shoot’s features.  For my purposes, the SX10 is practically everything I need for a beginning photographer without needing to overspend for features I won’t be able to appreciate until years down the line.