Canon PowerShot SD500

Design/Ergonomics Canon has taken design excellence to a new level with the SD500. In the past, cameras in Canon's Digital ELPH series had been pretty much square. With the SD500, though, Canon has introduced what it calls a Perpetual Curve design, contouring the edges so they feel good in your hand. The camera's stainless steel "titanium grey" chassis is also lovingly constructed. At six ounces, it feels heavier than some of the cameras we tested, but it's well balanced. In short, this is a camera that loves to be held.

LCD The Canon PowerShot SD500's display might not look like much on paper, but it produces great results. At two inches and with 118,000 pixels of resolution, the screen packs a lot of image information into a very sharp display. While not offering the picture frame-like quality of the Olympus Stylus, the SD500's screen gives a very good representation of what you've shot, especially in its supremely accurate colors. The LCD features a QuickBright function that temporarily takes the screen to maximum brightness to give you a better look when shooting outdoors. A Night Display option brightens the subject to make it easier to frame a shot during dusk, night, or other low-light situations.

Features With a large 7.1-megapixel CCD, the SD500 ties for the top spot in resolution of cameras we tested. The 4X zoom, ISO range of 50 to 400, multiple shooting settings, and VGA video capture at 30 and 60 frames per second up to the capacity of the memory card all combine for a powerful feature set. One interesting new feature is the Intelligent Orientation Sensor that, along with rotating vertical shots, automatically wakes up the camera from its Sleep when picked up. The coolest perk is the My Colors feature, which lets you do everything from darkening skin tones and swapping colors to accenting hues while making others fade to monochrome. Add to that extensive manual controls and you have a small camera that acts big.

Performance Thanks to its powerful DIGIC II image sensor, the SD500 produced some of the best-quality images of all the cameras that we tested. Shots were consistently rich in color and very sharp. The camera was also at the top of the group for start-up time, time to first shot, and shot to shot with barely any shutter lag. Not surprisingly, the seven megapixels of resolution helped this camera produce some of the best prints of the cameras we tested.

Verdict An extremely capable and flexible camera in a handsome package.