Canon PowerShot SD20 (Digital IXUS i5 / IXY Digital L2)

Opinion: It is a very handy camera, good pictures, good function, good close up.

Opinion: I have bought it a year ago and taken about 8000 shots, travelling quite a lot. I like it, it is really small, well build. It is the only digital camera I use (my big equipment is still from the old, good era: Bronica, Leica, Canon SLR). What I miss is aperture priority mode. It also seems quite noisy at ISO 400 (I never use this sensitivity anymore).

Opinion: i bought this camera for my wife to take out and take happy snaps with her and her friends. i am a DSLR user of the 20D and the 350D and thought the canon brand would be great for her as well.
NO WAY! the red eye on this camera is so poor that it makes the camera unusable in anything other than a very bright situation.
great for general outdoor usage...but who wants a compact point and shoot for anything other than family/friends happy snaps.
the small LCD is also prohibitive
i've sold it and bought the casio z500, much much much better.

Opinion: Disappointed.

Great package and design but I agree with Raoul Namur's review (30 Apr 05). Indoor photos, especially at night, are much too coarse for me and the red eye is really bad. My old 3.2mp Powershot S30 takes better quality photos.

I expected a 5mp camera with no zoom to provide for decent cropping but even the outdoor photos are too coarse. After 300 or so photos, I found way too many that were not good enough to print or crop -- All shot using Large resolution and Superfine compression.

PS: Most photos were shot using auto mode. I will try manual mode and center AF instead of AiAF. Will also try Center Weighted Average light metering instead of Evaluative.

Opinion: Great build quality except the cheap mode selector.
Image quality is excellent. There are some problems with purple fringing, but these probably cannot be avoided with such a small sensor. The fixed lens is of course a big advantage regarding image quality.
For a so called "point and shoot" it offers an amazing set of features which will even satisfy experienced users. An ideal secondary camera.
My favorite feature is the black & white mode, which actually gives much, much better results (less noise) than taking the picture in color mode and desaturate it in postprocessing. You get very usable results in ISO 400 in b&w. So the b&w mode is not just a gimmick as I thought before, but the in-camera processing seems to do some special stuff in b&w mode, not just desaturate the picture.
Unfortunately I think the camera is "over-designed". I would have preferred it looking less eye-catching. Its quite a serious little camera so I think it should have deserved a more serious look.

Opinion: Excellent!

Well, I have the camera for over a week now and tested a lot. Bought to have it always with me (for the case I don't want to bring out my Nikon D70). You might now good image quality is important to me. The Canon satisfies me! Not as sharp as the images from my Nikon, but more than average from all the other (super)compacts, i've seen. The fixed lens (40mm) is propably the cause here for. I really was looking for a camera with a fixed lens because you can take faster photo's and don't have to worry about zooming.
Although the camera weights only 140 gram the camera feels very solid. The lens is very small, but has a aparture of f2.8! The tiny lens makes me able to experiment so I can hold small lenses for it (for creative effect) and I even can put the lens for my oculair of my binoculairs (swarovski SLC 10*42W) and still get good image quality!
Noise can be present at 200 and 400 iso, but is reasonable and near my opinion nice and usefull (for grainy effect). In some ocaisions you can notice purple friging and red eyes, but mostly you can't notice it.
The camera is easy to operate. The LCD is not large (1,5"), but from a good quality and even with this LCD I experience it is more comfortable to compose the image with the LCD of the Canon then looking thrue the viewfinder of my Nikon SLR (causes me sometimes a headache). Accupower is very reasonable, but always buy a second accu!

Opinion: I bought this camera after using my wife's Canon A95 on a cycling trip to Switzerland last year and finding that virtually all the photos I took with the A95 were with the zoom at its widest setting, so I decided that I could happily forgo a zoom lens for the reduced size and weight of the SD20. I also found myself using the LCD on the A95 to frame and take photos much more than the viewfinder: the LCD gives more accurate framing and a better idea of how the camera will cope with the contrast range of the scene, so the lack of a viewfinder on the SD20 didn't bother me either.

On the plus side, I see noticeably less colour fringing on shots from the SD20 than on those from the A95, and image quality otherwise seems extremely good for such a compact camera. I've printed out some panoramas from the camera's stitch-assist mode on 13" wide Epson roll paper, and even up close they look pretty good. Most people are flabbergasted when they ask what camera I used for the photo and I haul out something so small. Battery life is good - I sat there with a freshly charged battery and cranked out flash shots of my loungeroom until I got a low battery warning in the viewfinder - just on 250 photos. So with the extra battery and 1Gb SD card that I purchased I should be able, on the highest image quality setting, to completely fill the ~380 shot capacity of the card without needing to recharge batteries.

On the minus side, noise in the images is rather noticeable at both 200 and 400 ISO settings. The SD card is a bit finicky to remove, and I notice that whenever I put the camera into stitch assist mode it no longer uses the highest image quality but the next setting down, as the size of each captured image approximately halves from around 2Mb to around 1Mb. I haven't found out how to stop the camera doing this. However, the A95 does exactly the same, so perhaps that's just how Canon does their stitch assist mode...

Opinion: As a user of "wet film" cameras (I still use my trusted 1956 Rolleiflex) this is my first try at digital photography, and I must say I am amazed by the results. How can a lens the size of a shirt button give such sharp images, I do not know.
Admittedly, it's a fixed length lens (and that's the reason why I chose the camera in the first place) -ever the traditionalist! Poor flash performance, but I don't mind.
The so called "manual" options work well the "indoors" setting does make a difference.
I only use the "large/fine" setting, and have enough space on a 512mb card.
Highly recommended and this is from an "old school" photographer (old git to the rest of the world).
Well done Canon.

Opinion: Very poor indoors, but good outdoors.
I use my Ixus for 10% outdoors and 90% indoors (I party a lot).
Outdoors, the photo quality is simply excellent, far better than my nikon coolpix 2000.