Last Saturday I finally got an offer on my Casio camera and started into the fun process of weeding through online consumer sites that offer comprehensive and unbiased product comments ( here ends the seething sarcasm). “Camera good, wish touch screen!” Seriously, were these people sleeping through grade 10 English?*

I head off to BestBuy (I know… I know…) and had 4 staff standing around me at once not looking me in the eye. You know the eye, the one that says “I have a question…?” but is met with personal conversations between the floor staff, awkward maneuvering out of my field of vision and outright ignorance to my plea. In the end we went over to Blacks across the street where one of my compadres managed to rip the security lock off a display camera, setting off an alarm. As dutiful white boys we were, we stood there and waited for a staff person to come and shut it off. And waited. And waited. To the point where the alarm started to die and croak. We just left, off to Henrys where I was ready to drop my $279 (plus SD card and taxes) for a Canon SD780 SI. Until I found out that Henry’s flagship store isn’t open on Sunday. Huh? Oh well, Downtown Camera’s doors were wide open and I didn’t mind paying $10 more for the convenience. They were extremely helpful and knowledgeable about their product and bent over backwards to find a battery and a SD card so I could test the camera indoors. From now on, I’ll do all my demo testing at big box stores and then head over to specialty stores for my final sale.

It’s toted as Canon’s smallest, but no where near as small as the old Casio. It looks a lot like SharkBoy’s camera but with more beveled edges. It has all the familiar feel of my old A640 but without the big hard-to-move scene selector knob on top. Poof! Gone.

They’ve moved around some items in the menu system due to the new AutoScene function – no more flicking through menu options to find the Macro or Fireworks options, the sensors see it and then set it up with one press of the shutter button.

It shoots “HD” as well, which means video at 1280×720 at 30fps with HDMI output (720p). Now I need to get a mini-HDMI cable and try it. You think with all the new doodleydoos for video they’d have autofocus during recording. For now, here’s a vid for you. Be sure to click on the HD button in the controls:


*I know… I’m one to talk. But come on…