Canon PowerShot SX230 HS. A compact that packs a punch.

I’ve always been one of those people who have to look the part. It might be an iPad2, a top of the range notebook, or the very latest DSLR. Those little envious sideway glances from people aspiring to own one but can’t for whatever reason, are the very things I live for. Photographers are the worst of the lot though. Just get a few of them in a room together and they can’t wait to compare notes.

I’ve always had a trusted SLR and for me, it looks the part. Reasonable bulky, a decent lens and a strap and it’ll pass muster as belonging to someone who knows how to take a snap or two. Compacts though are a different matter entirely. They use technology that can produce some damn fine pictures; the trouble is, can they look professional enough?

The Canon Powershot SX230 HS may be on the small side, but it certainly packs a punch with a wide range of 12.1 megapixel shooting options and 1080 HD video recording too. It has a 3 inch full colour LCD screen, but thankfully for me, no touch screen controls, just a neat combination of buttons and dials that hide a plethora of features. For a start, the camera gives you a whopping 14X optical zoom, (equivalent to a focal length of 28-392mm) the lens popping out a good four inches from its housing, which conveniently retracts automatically when you turn the camera off. It’s got a decent standard low light sensitivity with an ISO ranging from 100 to 3,200 whilst there is an additional low light option that boosts the ISO to 6,900 but with a significant drop in picture quality to 3 megapixels.

Serious photographers will be delighted to see the Powershot SX230 has a full range of manual controls available to use as well as the more popular automated formats leisure consumers crave. Simply selecting the EASY mode will let you just point and shoot with the camera’s intelligent auto system selecting the best possible option for you. There are though a number of semi auto scene modes built in too such as ‘kids and pets,’ ‘landscapes’ or ‘smart shutter’, whilst the built in face and smile detection will zero in on subjects it thinks you want to be the focal point of your picture.

The feature that stands this model apart from its predecessor, the SX210 however is the built in GPS. This will identify where you are in the world and automatically label your pictures accordingly. Be careful though, using the GPS function is likely to drain the battery life pretty quickly.

The one annoying aspect to the SX230 for me was the flash housing popping up each time I turned the camera on. It happens to be just where your index finger rests when you hold the camera, so you either get distracted pushing it closed, or it doesn’t pop up when you need it because your finger is blocking it.

That apart, I was really impressed with the SX230. It gave me some great quality pictures and video without causing me too much concern; it was compatible with my standard memory card, and although the on screen menus were a little clumsy to navigate though, I got the hang of them in the end.

The SX230 is certainly a lot smaller than my SLR and though using it I felt more like a tourist than a professional photographer, the end results certainly gave my SLR a run for its money.
RRP from £250