Canon Powershot SX240HS

Summary

Canon Powershot SX240HS is a wonderful travel zoom camera offering 20x optical zoom. It's quite an improvement over the SX220HS sporting a better image processor, thereby giving more detail in the images. The HD video recording mode is quite good offering better noise control in both indoor and outdoor conditions over the SX220HS. Quite feature-rich for the newbies as well as amateur users. We just felt the pricing at Rs. 19,995 was a bit on the higher side despite the free 4GB SD card. Makes for an ideal purchase if you are looking for a good travel zoom on the market, provided the pricing comes down.

Last month Canon announced a refresh of its Powershot series of cameras. The Powershot SX240HS is the one we got our hands on recently. It is an upgraded version of the popular compact travel zoom camera - the Powershot SX220HS. The higher end travel zoom, i.e., the Powershot SX230HS has been replaced by SX260 HS. Basic difference between the SX 240HS and SX260HS being that the latter has a GPS unit onboard.

Design and Features:
On first glance, the Powershot SX240HS looks very similar to its predecessor the SX220HS and also sports the same 12.1MP backside illuminated CMOS sensor. But there are some incremental changes under the hood. For starters, the SX240HS sports the latest DIGIC 4 image processor, the optical zoom has been bumped up from 14x to 20x zoom and finally there are around four IS modes.

Build quality is quite sturdy despite it being a plastic body. On the front face of the camera you have a finger grip whereas the thumb rest is missing on the rear side. But you still get a good grip as the camera fits snugly in your palms. On the top you have the shutter button which is surrounded by the zoom lever. Beside this you have the power button. On the left hand side is the pop-up flash which still pops up everytime you turn on the camera which is annoying.

The mode-dial has an extra option called Live mode where as the rest of the layout is very similar to the SX 220HS. It can be rotated with a single thumb also but will require some additional pressure and you will not miss-rotate the dial as your thumb rests around this spot for the simple reason that the mode locking mechanism on the dial is quite strong. The four functional buttons around the navigational pad have a good feedback and the circular dial around the navigation pad rotates quite smoothly.

The 3-inch 461,000 dot LCD screen is the same as the one seen on the SX220HS. The user interface hasn’t changed at all for someone who is familiar with the previous generation Canon cameras. Just press the Func. Set button in the centre of the navpad to bring up the contextual options. The Menu allows you the option to set the AF modes, IS settings, Flash settings among others.