I’ve been thinking for a while about upgrading my small, travel-friendly camera. I’ve had a Canon S500 for nearly three years. It is/was a great camera, and amazingly rugged. But, it was a litle too heavy, and not small enough to slip into your shirt pocket so it wasn’t great for fun, light pictures on the go. On my recent trip to NY I got an hour of free time and headed over to B&H Photo and Video on 9th Avenue. I wanted to see the store that I had ordered so much from online, and it was a gadget geeks dream. If you like camera stuff, you must go.

I checked out a dozen of the Canon small cameras and decided to go ahead with the Canon SD750. It is only a month old, and has an amazing form factor. It’s about the size of my Blackberry 8800, just a couple of millimeters thicker. Pretty crazy. I seriously considered the Canon SD800IS because I really wanted optical image stabilization, but I didn’t like the older form factor.

The startup time for the camera is good. Not like my Canon 20D, but that’s to be expected. It is ready to shoot in a second. The real “wow” happens when you look at the back though.

The screen on the SD750 is just massive. It’s only 3" in size, but it seems just enormous. You can read a detailed review if you are curious, but there are some really nice convenience features on this camera that I’m loving.

  • Support for a travel timezone so you can flip your clock around much easier.

  • When you are looking at photos, the orientation sensor is used to show you the photo in the right orientation. Nice touch.

  • The D-pad control is almost touch sensitive. It’s hard to explain, but a nice effect in the UI.

The pictures I’ve taken so far are great. The only thing I really miss is that it doesn’t support Canon RAW, so I’ve got JPEG files back into my workflow. Oh well. It’s a great camera.