Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

A few months ago I wanted to buy Bella a digital camera so she could take pictures when she went to visit her family in Utah. I found a Canon PowerShot SD890 IS digital camera at Sams Club and liked it so much I bought another one for myself.

The PowerShot is very easy to use and offers a number of features that makes it very useful for the amateur photographer. Since it is a 10 MegaPixel camera the images are crisp and of good quality. The Optical Image Stabilizer System comes in handy to get rid of the shakes and the Digital Zoom enables me to get real close to capture very small objects (It will focus as close as .79 inches). I use it in my work, in fact all of the photos displayed in this blog were taken with this camera. Since I carry it in my laptop bag I am amazed at how often I use it to document my work. A picture is worth a thousand words and several pictures of a rack or when performing a site survey has proven to be very useful to me.

Even though the camera has a real image optical zoom viewfinder, I find that I use the 2.5-inch TFT color LCD with wide viewing angle (PureColor LCD II) most of the time. The LCD is also used to view and even edit images that have been taken. The built in flash has a limited range of 11 feet which wasn't powerful enough for taking pictures outdoors at night in the rain but it wasn't meant to be. It uses a SD/SDHC Memory Card which is really handy as I can take a picture, pull the card and plug it into the SD slot of either my laptop or PC and immediately use the picture in a document. I replaced the 32MB SD Memory Card that came with the camera with a 4GB SDHC card so I can take LOTS of pictures. The camera uses a easy to remove Rechargeable Lithium-ion Battery which is suppose to be good for around 320 shots when using the LCD. It comes with a battery charger and while I haven't found the need, one could always purchase a spare battery to use while recharging a spent battery.

Having used this camera for the last few months it is easy for me to recommend it for anyone.