As you obvi­ously know by now, I’m a gadget freak, and I also love pho­tog­ra­phy. This com­bi­na­tion means that I tend to buy a lot of photo and video related gad­getry. The latest entry is the Canon SD960IS, a 12 megapixel point-and-shoot camera that also shoots 1280×720 HD video.

This is decid­edly a con­sumer level prod­uct, but the results seem to be any­thing but. The photos are crisp and clear, and even the ‘auto’ mode tends to do a good job of find­ing the cor­rect expo­sure. Most all Canon prod­ucts feel super solid, and this is no exception.

But wait, don’t you already have a camera I already own a Canon Rebel XT and I absolutely love it. For the money, noth­ing takes better photos, but it’s obvi­ously got it’s draw­backs. Some­thing that big and clunky (and rel­a­tively expen­sive) is always in danger of being ruined, and it’s fairly cum­ber­some to take out places where shoot­ing isn’t your pri­mary objec­tive. I wanted some­thing smaller cheaper, but that still took really solid photos.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to choose what to bring – the Rebel or the Flip. Every time, I tend to feel like I made the wrong choice when either some­thing great hap­pens that I’d love to have had on video, or I find some beau­ti­ful scenery or archi­tec­ture I’d like to cap­ture on film. With the SD960, the pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t going to be SLR – qual­ity, but it’s not going to be bad either.

It’ll cer­tainly do, and frankly most people won’t be able to tell on 90 of the shots I take. And I’ll have a consumer-​level HD video camera at my dis­posal, too! Video, the killer feature What sold me on this model is the 1280×720 HD video that it takes.

It may not be the high­est qual­ity HD camera out there – it’s cer­tainly not – but it’s very clear, it seems to handle dif­fer­ent light­ing con­di­tions well, and it will allow me to shoot infi­nitely more video that I do right now (not all that much). I actu­ally got a Flip Ultra about this time last year, and I used it a ton while at the beach and on vaca­tion, but it was just one more thing to carry around, and gen­er­ally was that one thing that got left behind if I had to choose between the Flip or my Rebel XT. Now i can just take the SD960 with me and not have to worry about if I’m going to be shoot­ing video or not. If I want to, I can. Below is a sample video I put together in iMovie when I got back.

The qual­ity is degraded but if you visit the actual video page you can see that it’s a really high qual­ity video camera. User interface improvements Another great thing about this camera are the UI improve­ments that come along with the newer models. A scroll wheel makes all options quickly avail­able, and scrolling through photos has a very ‘iPhone’ like feel to it. For a cheap­ish point-and-shoot, I’m very impressed with what they’ve man­aged to put together.

SD cards are dirt cheap too. I got a 16gb SD card for about $35, and accord­ing to specs I’ve read and the manual, that should equal around 1.5 – 2 hours of video at the high­est qual­ity, or some­thing like 6000 photos. Real­is­ti­cally, that means I can take this camera on vaca­tion, shoot around 45 min­utes of video and take a couple thou­sand photos and never have to worry about it. Throw in the Rebel XT for those times where I know I’m going to be taking really amaz­ing photos, and I should be set.

For $300, this Camera is def­i­nitely worth the money. There was one phys­i­cal flaw on the screen – one stuck pixel – but I’m going to try to stop being so OCD and let that go. It doesn’t affect any­thing, so I’ll just stick with it. You can see photos of my trip to Mexico Beach, where I used the SD960, at my Flickr page. Heck, I might even make more use of my Vimeo account!

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Posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 11: 43 am and filed under Gadgets, Pictures, Reviews, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.