Canon PowerShot SX150 IS review

If you’re as grumpily impatient as us, this will be enough by itself to rule the SX150 IS out. It’s perhaps fortunate, then, that our image quality tests revealed that we wouldn’t be missing much. While the Canon compact cameras that we’ve admired so much in recent months have used back-illuminated CMOS sensors – as denoted by the HS suffix to product names – this one uses a less sophisticated CCD sensor.

The soft details may be down to camera shake more than poor focus, but telephoto photography in anything other than direct sunlight proved tricky with this camera – click to enlarge

Photos taken in overcast weather had a propensity for blurry details and over-exposed pale skin tones. Focus was sharp in more favourable lighting but chromatic aberrations gave multi-coloured halos to high contrast subjects. Our studio tests revealed clean colours and sharp details at ISO 80, and the camera did a reasonable job of suppressing noise at fast ISO speeds, but fine details suffered as a result and darker areas of photos exhibited multi-coloured blotches. The video mode fared reasonably well, with silent autofocusing and a reasonably quiet zoom motor, but the 720p resolution is disappointing and the battery issue is worrying.

Over-exposed highlights in pale skin tones were a common problem in our tests – click to enlarge

The Canon PowerShot SX230 HS and Fujifilm F600EXR are both in a different league for photo and video quality, come with Li-ion batteries, GPS geo-tagging and are currently available for around £190 inc VAT. The SX150 IS isn’t much cheaper, and it’s a false economy.