I'm a just a fellow who wants to take nature photos, and my kid at soccer and stuff for eBay and such. I owned a Canon EOS 7D with fancy lenses, the whole works--about $3000 worth of Canon stuff. all I needed was this camera.

The EOS DSLR is heavy, "fixy", and not good for nature walks and plenty of mobility at sporting events. Rarely would I use the 8 frames per second shooting rates. I watched the DVDs on EOS 7D, and played with it and took some pretty artsy photos that I blew up and put in my office. It's a great camera, the pricey EOS DSRL. But it had plenty of drawbacks: price, size, bulk, complex attachments, battery life, compact flash rather than SDR cards, and on and on.

But for what I need, this Canon here is stellar, and I sold all my EOS stuff, and extra lenses on eBay!! I'm totally thrilled with the size, build, and photo quality of this camera. Frankly, it's one of those situation where, to get the highest level of quality you have to pay... Read more

I purchased this camera as a replacement for my Panasonic FZ-35. After having taken a few hundred pictures - including some side-by-side comparisons with the FZ35, here is my impression.

The canon image processor is much better at color balance and overall image capture than the FZ35 - images are brighter and so capture more details otherwise lost in shadow or just a tendency the FZ35 has towards gray-scale processing in order to get the excellent sharpness the FZ35 is known for.

Having said that - I would not recommend using the Auto setting on the Canon. Its choice of focal point within an image tends towards creating images where the background is just as likely to be more in focus than the subject. Typically the camera tries to focus around the edge of the subject rather than the subject itself. Sometimes this can work to improve clarity by improving depth of focus a bit, sometimes it creates an image where nothing is in focus and sometimes it causes the... Read more

Customer Video Review Length:: 0:31 Mins

First handheld test of my Canon SX30IS with 35x optical + 4x digital zoom (140x) 3360mm (35mm eqiv) on a windy day at sunset.