I bought the Canon SD700 last month for my upcoming trip to Hawaii. It is replacing our Canon S400 that has served us for several years and even survived a replacement of the rear LCD. The S400 has a new home in an underwater housing case. My experience with the camera so far has been excellent.
I was a little torn between the SD700 and SD800 (which has a wider angle 28mm lens and face recognition focusing/metering), but I’ve got my Nikon D70 for wide angle and the wider 28mm won’t be missed by most (especially if you’ve never had it on a camera).
Another thing I had to consider was high ISO performance for night shots without flash. Compact point cameras have tiny sensors with lots of pixels on them, turn up their sensitivity and it leads to noise. The Fuji F30/F40 use a CCD sensor that performs very well at higher ISOs like 800. ISO 800 on the SD700 is very noisy and barely usable except for sized down prints on the web, the Fujis would have no problem on prints.
For me it came down to what is my most common low light shooting situation and the trade offs of Image Stabilization and High ISO. IS for shooting still objects, High ISO for low light action shots. I found the IS to be more useful since I can set my D70 at ISO 1600 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens for really low light situations.
Enough of me being picky, let the pictures do the talking. I’ll post a more in depth review comparing the SD700 to the S400 and D70, should be interesting to see how the new SD700 stacks up against the older S400 which was hot stuff back in the day.
