Canon Digital Elph S400 Great Compact for All Shooters


This pocketable point and shoot has lots of sophisticated features... but that doesn't make it any less fun.

I've been shooting with Canon's S400 since buying one at B&H Photo during a summer visit to New York City. I've owed compact cameras by Canon and Olympus, and have generally enjoyed them for snap-shooting, but the S400 takes portable photography to a new level.

If you want, you can put it in "auto everything" and get great results. Its 4-megapixel images give you plenty of resolution for making enlargements or for cropping out the interesting parts of pictures and tossing out the rest. It takes CompactFlash memory cards, which I still prefer because they are affordable and plentiful. Plus I don't lose them as easily as I do the smaller cards such as xD and SD. Canon lenses are usually quite good, and the S400 is not exception -- sharp as a tack and excellent color.

But the S400 also gives you spot metering, exposure compensation, macro, lots of flash options, movie mode (an excellent one at that), special effects, burst mode, and panorama mode, just to name some of its advanced features. After mastering the controls, which doesn't take long, there isn't much this pocketable shooter can't do.

Mac OS X users have some special goodies to play with. Take a look at my article, Rendezvous Picture Transfer with Panther to see how you can share images across a network directly from the S400. Plus, you can actually fire the camera remotely using nothing more than your Web browser. Really cool.

If you already own an S400, you might want to take a look at my Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition. Many of the illustrations explaining camera controls use, you guessed it, the S400 as the example camera.

I've seen prices as low as $399 US for this compact beauty. Among the current crop of portable digicams, I have to say, the S400 is a real steal.

Posted: Thu - December 11, 2003 at 08:32 PM      

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