Digital Elph Scores High on Cool-o-Meter

Too Much Style?

Along with its good looks, the Elph serves up a couple of design quirks. Because of the camera's small size, the optical viewfinder is correspondingly tiny and located too close to the right-hand grip. While looking through the viewfinder, I couldn't get a firm grip on the camera without pressing my nose against my thumb. The built-in flash is also small, and it doesn't provide enough of a light source for dimly lit photo opportunities. As a result, test photographs taken indoors and at night came out dark and lacked background detail.

For downloading pictures, the Digital Elph offers a Universal Serial Bus cable.

The overall package is decent. Canon includes its PhotoStitch software for merging photos to create panoramic shots, as well as Adobe's PhotoDeluxe photo editing package, a rechargeable NB-1L lithium-ion battery, and a recharger. In my informal tests--during which I shot through the viewfinder and checked images on the LCD--the battery ran out of juice after about 2 hours of shooting. (Operating the LCD uses up the battery quicker than any other activity.)

The Canon PowerShot S100 Digital Elph rates high on the cool-o-meter, and it takes handsome outdoor photos. But given the camera's features, the list price is a tad high. We found the camera available online at about $100 less than its list price. However, we were also able to find the Olympus C-2020 and the Nikon CoolPix 800--both 2-megapixel cameras that offer more manual features than the Elph--selling for about $600.