Peanuts for an Elph

Amazon's Gold Box "Deal of the Day" today is the Canon PowerShot ELPH 510 HS, billed as the "world's thinnest camera with 28mm wide-angle lens, 12x optical zoom, and optical image stabilizer," for $159. In "black, raspberry, or teal."

I know nothing about this camera but pass along the news whenever the deal o' the day is photo-related.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Emily Cartier: "The main 'drawback' of the Elphs vs. the S90/95/100 is the Elphs are JPEG only. If you pay close attention to your white balance and your subject, you can get really nice results with them. I also spent a fair bit of time with mine experimenting with the different baked-in color settings to find the one that matched up best with how I see the world. That way I have done a lot of the stuff I'd otherwise do in editing beforehand. If you expect to do heavy editing, they're a bad camera choice.

"I actually use one for 'wildlife' photography. Nothing seriously exotic, just the urban wildlife in Madison, but that includes several woodpecker species, eagles, redtail hawks, a couple kinds of cranes, wild turkeys, muskrat and beavers. Being patient and hanging out to really watch how the animals behave and move means you can see interesting things.

"You don't get direct control of the shutter and aperture, but if you do some diligent practicing, you'll learn how Canon's software tends to set things at various ISOs and exposure compensation settings. The software is not out to screw you up, and the defaults it uses are good and sensible defaults. Eventually, you learn to change the ISO setting to get the right sort of shutter and aperture for your subject and lighting.

"The one thing Canon could do to improve the Elphs is to make the zoom a 'stepped' zoom, so the user gets a feel for the focal lengths. Otherwise, it tends to be very much like carrying a two-lens kit with a modest wide angle and a modest telephoto."

Comments

[Mandeno Moments]

CNet review: http://tinyurl.com/7rslae3

It has a reasonably sane 12 megapixies and the sensor is backside-illuminated.

[Roy]

Interesting that this little camera is designed to be presented in portrait format. I haven't noticed anything else with graphics oriented this way.
Roy

[Bryan]

I think Canon forgot to put buttons on that camera.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

CHDK [Canon hack development kit —Ed.] doesn't seem to support this camera, and it's no on the list of ones under development, either, which is unfortunate (that gives you RAW output, in particular).

[DB]

Re: RAW files from "lesser" Canons.

I haven't used it myself, but CHDK* can apparently unlock many features on Canon cameras that have them disabled by default, including RAW.

A quick look tells me that the Elph 500 is supported, in beta now. Some digging around may be required to figure out CHDK plans for the featured Elph 510.

*http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Thanks for this tip, Mike. I just bought one (through your link) for someone who really, really needs a new camera. He's not a photographer -- RAW means nothing to him (other than a potential salmonella infection -- but he needs a small, reliable, good digital camera to grab memo shots. I think this will be perfect for him, and a real bargain!

[Roger Bradbury]

H'mm, sounds like a good, elphy discount : ]