Stuff Geeks Want

There’s a ton of moderately priced, pocket sized digital cameras on the market. So many, in fact, that picking out your point-and-shoot is probably more daunting than actually learning how to use the thing.

We’re big fans of Canon’s PowerShot Digital Elph series, which are consistently well constructed, pack good performance, and have the best user interface among this class of cameras.

Canon’s PowerShot SD870 IS is particularly attractive, primarily because it offers something few competitors do: a built-in wide-angle lens.

The 28-105mm range means you won’t have to be as far away from your subjects to fit everything into the frame, which for most people probably happens more often than the need for an ultra long zoom. Still, the 3.8x optical zoom makes the SD870 IS plenty capable of snapping subjects from afar, and the optical image stabilization means those long-distance shots have a good chance of coming out clear.

Other great features:

• 8-megapixel CCD
• 3-inch LCD
• 15-1/1600 sec. shutter speed
• DiG!C III processor
• Face detection auto-focus

Another great thing about the SD870 IS is that it’s not part of Canon’s latest line-up of cameras, which means you can save big money without sacrificing much performance (and it’s still the best Elph with a 28mm lens). Amazon stocks the silver version for $247 and the black one for $261. Both prices are roughly $200 less than what the SD870 retailed for it when it first came out last year.

The PowerShot G9 is the newest high-end point-and-shoot from Canon with the same styling nod to the 35mm film cameras of days gone by as its predecessor, the G7.

The G9 packs some of the same features as the G7 while improving on others, including:

• image stabilized optics
• an impressive 6x optical zoom (and 4x digital zoom)
• Digic III processor
• 3-inch true color LCD
• RAW format option (like more expensive DSLRs)
• 3200 max ISO
• 12.1-megapixel CCD

What makes the G9 more special than your regular crazy-high-megapixel camera is that it boasts all the same manual adjustments and features of an SLR, so you won’t have to sacrifice any shooting options if you don’t feel like lugging your brand new Canon XSi with you everywhere you go.

The G9 is significantly bigger than its new cousin, the diminutive SD890, but is still a good back-pocket size and well worth the extra dimensions for packing DSLR-like capabilities in a little point-and-shoot.

And fear not, the G9 is priced like a quality point-and-shoot should be: $449 from Amazon with free shipping, meaning it will take just enough money out of your back pocket to make room for itself to fit in there.

The Canon PowerShot TX1 is just sick.

This camera is the ultimate hand-held pocket sized camera, not only because it takes awesome photos, but because it also shoots HD quality video and is the smallest form-factor camera to do so.

If you need a good on-the-go camera that you can keep on you all the time, but want something with better than VGA quality video, you should definitely check this out. We’ve owned this camera for three months now, and we really really love it.

We use it all the time: to take photos of the kids, or quick videos of them running in circles (both of our boys are under 5 and are hilarious sometimes), and we’ve taken it with us on many trips so we can take quick snapshots of where we’ve been.

Canon got it right with this camera. It lives up to the Canon name with it’s fantastic image and video quality, and blows everything else out of the water with it’s ability to shoot in HD.

For $355.00 you can’t go wrong with a Canon PowerShot TX1 7.1MP Digital Camera