Canon SD950 IS Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Excellent overall color and hue accuracy, with minor oversaturation of some colors.

Saturation. The Canon PowerShot SD950 IS did oversaturate strong red and blue, but remaining colors are just about right. Bright reds and blues are quite typical of consumer models, but the SD950 IS handled a range of subjects quite well, with pleasing color. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, with the color balanced properly for the light source, the SD950 IS produced slightly pink skin tones. However, results were still fairly natural in appearance. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The PowerShot SD950 IS showed small color shifts relative to the correct mathematical translation of colors in its subjects, pushing cyan toward blue, for example. Still, overall color was much more accurate than many digital cameras we test. Hue is "what color" the color is.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Actually pretty good results with all three white balance settings, though most accurate color with the Manual option. About average positive exposure compensation required.

Indoors, under incandescent lighting, the PowerShot SD950 IS' Auto white balance setting produced pretty good results, despite the slight warm cast. (Though warm, color balance here is much better than average performance for Auto white balance on consumer cameras.) Both the Incandescent and Manual settings produced more accurate results, with the Manual option producing the best overall. The Canon SD950 IS required a +1.0 EV exposure compensation boost to get a good exposure, which is about average for this shot. Overall color with the Manual white balance setting is good, though skin tones are a bit pink. Though a little dark, the blue flowers actually look pretty good as well. (Many digital cameras reproduce these flowers with a dark, purplish tint, so the SD950 IS performs well here.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.

Outdoors, daylight
Good overall color, though slightly dark from the high contrast. Pretty good exposure as well, though high contrast results in very bright highlights.

Outdoors, the Canon PowerShot SD950 IS produced pretty good overall exposures, though contrast was very high, resulting very hot highlights. In both shots above, the brightest highlights show limited detail. Shadow areas show moderate detail, though with strong noise and noise suppression. The camera's low contrast adjustment produced a modest effect on overall contrast. Overall color is slightly dark, thanks in part to the high contrast, but is still pretty good. The Auto white balance setting handled both situations pretty well, though with slightly pinkish highlights on the portrait shot.

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Resolution
Very high resolution, 1,700 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,700 lines per picture height in both directions, though lines are clearest horizontally. Extinction didn't really occur. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Overall pretty good image sharpness. However, a small amount of visible edge enhancement in areas of high contrast, and a fair amount of noise suppression in shadow areas.

Sharpness. The Canon PowerShot SD950 IS' captures a lot of detail, with very good definition. However, in high contrast areas some enhancement artifacts are visible, such as in the crop above left. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows a fair amount of noise suppression, with darker areas of Marti's hair showing limited detail. Individual strands fade into each other in the shadow areas, but unless you're printing a poster, you'll never notice with the 12-megapixel resolution. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low to moderate noise at the normal sensitivity settings, though a jump in noise with strong blurring and loss of color at the higher settings.

At the Canon PowerShot SD950 IS' lower ISO settings, noise isn't very bad at all. But starting around ISO 200 and 400, the noise pattern picks up and pixels are more noticeable. The effect is quite strong at ISO 1,600, with significant loss of detail and color saturation. At ISO 3,200, the camera can only capture images at 1,600 x 1,200 pixels (around 2 megapixels), but the entire image is blurry, with very smudged detail. See Output Quality notes below for how all this pans out when printed.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High contrast and limited highlight detail, though great resolution and detail. Good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images in near darkness.

Sunlight. The Canon PowerShot SD950 IS produced high contrast in response to the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above, with limited highlight detail. However, shadow detail is pretty good, despite some noise suppression and noise artifacts. Exposure compensation was on the high side of average at +1.0 EV, creating very hot highlights on the white shirt. Though the highlights are more in check in the +0.7 EV exposure, the overall image is much too dim for my taste. Consider reducing the contrast setting with the SD950 IS, and be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above; it's better to shoot in the shade when possible.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Low light. The Canon PowerShot SD950 IS performed well on the low-light test, capturing bright images at the lowest light level with the next to lowest sensitivity setting (ISO 100). At ISO 80, the image at the darkest light level is a bit dim. At ISO 3,200, however, images get darker with the light level, as it seems the camera limits the exposure to 1/9 second, in an effort to combat image noise. Noise increases with higher ISOs, but this is expected. Color balance was good with the Auto white balance setting. The camera's autofocus system worked well also, as it was able to focus on the subject almost down to the 1/8 foot-candle light level unassisted, and down to the darkest light level with the AF assist enabled. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) For such applications, you may have better luck with a digital SLR camera, but even there, you'll likely need to set the focus manually. For information and reviews on digital SLRs, refer to our SLR review index page.

Coverage and Range
A fairly powerful flash, with about average coverage. Our standard shots required less than average exposure compensation.

Flash coverage was uneven at wide angle, but more uniform at full telephoto. In the Indoor test, the Canon SD950 IS' flash underexposed our subject just a little at its default setting, requiring only a +0.3 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get reasonably bright results. Interestingly, the exposure dimmed with the +0.7 EV adjustment, and became much too bright at +1.0 EV. So, though the exposure is a little low at +0.3 EV, it was the best in the series. The camera's Slow-Sync flash mode produced slightly brighter and more even results, though with a stronger pinkish-orange cast from the room lighting. In this mode, the camera required slightly more exposure compensation at +0.7 EV.

ISO 100 Range. At wide angle, flash shots at ISO 100 remained fairly bright all the way out to a distance of about 16 feet. At full telephoto and ISO 100, the target at 7 feet was just bright enough, but the images darken gradually from there.

Manufacturer Specified Flash Test. In the wide angle shot above, the Canon SD950 IS performs as Canon says it will, producing a a slight overexposure at the rated distance with its ISO set to Auto (which selected ISO 200). At telephoto, the camera again selected ISO 200 and the exposure looks pretty good.

Note: Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. We've now also begun shooting two shots using the manufacturer-specified camera settings, at the range the company claims for the camera, to assess the validity of the specific claims.

Print Quality
Good print quality, good color, clear 16x20-inch prints. ISO 200 is good to 13x19, ISO 400 images are good at 11x14, ISO 800 shots are still good at 8x10, and ISO 1,600 shots are great at 5x7.

The Canon PowerShot SD950 IS had enough resolution to make good looking 16x20-inch prints from ISO 80 and 100 shots. ISO 200 shots start to show chroma noise at that size, though, which becomes negligible at 13x19. ISO 400 shots start to go soft at 13x19, but do well at 11x14, which is amazing from a pocket camera. ISO 800 images are better at 8x10, and ISO 1,600 shots are decent at 8x10, but much better at 5x7 inches. ISO 3,200 shots really aren't usable even at 4x6 due to very mushy "detail." Overall, though an amazing performance from this pocket camera.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon i9900 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon i9900 review for details on that model.)