Hey this Scott of Photography Banzai.
Today I'm taking a look at this Canon Powershot ELPH 180.
Tiny little digicam! Talk about it compare it to a smartphone in image quality
and try to give you an idea if it's worth picking up something like this these days.
Let's get started!
Let's look at the general features of the camera. This is plastic casing. This ring
here is metal. On the top here we have a little jog dial for zoom. Shutter button. On off button.
On this side there is a little flap for the usb connection/av out.
Bottom you have your tripod connector 1/4th-20 and your battery door/memory card area.
Here we go! And (press) the button.
Pretty quick to start up.
The battery that comes with camera is the np-11L. 680 milliamp hours. So to charge
the battery it's very simple. You put it in the thing and you attach it to a ac outlet.
Interface is pretty simple. Again, you've got on the top a jog dial.
The lens does extend quite a bit.
5 to 40millimeters. 1:3.2 to 6.9 aperture.
It does have a built-in flash.
Pretty simple menu, you have two tabs. One for some information. By default
the camera will make beeps and bops and sounds but I prefer to have that off.
So that's pretty quick to turn off, which is nice.
You also have hints that you can leave on or off.
Display brightness it's pretty washed out looking, but decently bright.
Definitely not the best screen ever. It is not a touch screen.
Pretty simple easy to use menu. The main tab we've got
autofocus modes... center... so right in the middle of the frame it's not going to shift.
Go back in there we can change it to face tracking, or you've got standard tracking.
Let's go into standard tracking mode.
So when you half-press the shutter on something the camera is going to attempt to keep that
in focus. That's a pretty convenient mode, but you're really relying on the camera's ability.
Digital zoom, I would leave this off most cases it's basically allowing the camera to
zoom further than it's really capable of with this lens.
With it on it goes all the way mechanically, but then you've got a little bit of extra.
Got your lamp setting so in dark situations the camera will attempt
to help you focus with this little bright lamp.
It does have a time stamp. That's a old era film thing that they used to do
where it actually imprinted a date and time on your images, so that's what it's
going to look like when I zoom in and that's literally imprinted on the image down there.
You got function set so you get a little bit more stuff to adjust in there. You press it
so we start with metering. Gives you different ways to control your exposure
based on spot metering or center weighted and then the standard is the evaluative.
White balance, if you're in certain lighting conditions it can be nice to adjust this
and this camera does not shoot RAW images so it is smart to be using white balance.
ISO settings from 100 to 1600.
And you've got: program mode, digital IS mode, portrait mode, timer, low light, fisheye,
miniature, toy camera, monochrome, super vivid, poster effects, fireworks, and long shutter.
No full manual mode.
You can do exposure compensation, which is going to be your main way of adjusting
your overall exposure in your images.
And that's going to combined with your metering settings.
Focus range, we've got macro mode, normal, and infinity landscape style photography.
Drive modes: single shooting or continuous. Let's quickly try out the continuous.
It's probably about one frame a second.
You can adjust your image quality settings. Standard 20 megapixel mode
and you have smaller modes if you want to do that for some reason.
And lastly you've got your video modes so that is 720p video mode and then a standard vga 640x480.
You have a dedicated button for flash settings. Press it once... keep pressing it it'll toggle
through those different options. You've got automatic, on, slow syncro, and off.
You got an info button down here to hide or display your settings.
Here's your dedicated video record button.
Simply just press it. Press in a second time to turn off the video recording.
Build quality feels decent in the hands. It is a pretty compact camera which is nice.
The question is do you want something like this when you
have a decent smartphone? It's hard to say.
I'm going to show you tests outdoors and indoors with this camera compared to a
smartphone and specifically the Moto G Stylus 5G.
And you can see the image quality differences and
the potential benefits or negatives between the two.
The smartphone I have does do RAW images which gives it a potential benefit compared to a
camera like this. But this one does have the optical zoom lens and my specific phone does
not. There are phones that do have optical zoom lenses but they are relatively rare.
Main benefit I see of any camera like this is optical zoom lens,
so you have an 8x range on this specific zoom lens. Which is a 5 to 40 millimeters
the aperture on this lens is not great f/3.2 to 6.9 throughout that range.
Usually smartphones have faster lenses on them.
At the very least this is pretty compact relatively easy to use
very simple entry level dedicated camera.
There might be some situations where you prefer this based on
the control scheme and everything else compared to a smartphone.
Smartphones... you've got your screen, touch screen, but it's not great in
cold situations or other situations where having physical dedicated buttons is very nice.
Of course this camera is small so the buttons are not amazing on it, but they're functional.
This top button here which says auto can go to program mode or
auto mode and that's pretty much it.
In auto mode it's as simple as possible. It's going to attempt to focus where it feels like.
With video on the Moto camera and the canon camera... The Moto is using a
lot of sharpening but you could probably adjust that depending on what app you use.
Still, they both are pretty comparable.
When you include the zoom lens into the equation you get a lot better
movie quality from the Canon compared to the Moto phone because it only has digital zoom.
Anyways hope you enjoyed this video on the Canon Powershot ELPH 180.
Tried to go over various aspects of these small
cheap dedicated cameras, and if they're a decent option these days.
Hope you found the video interesting.
I'm Scott from Photography Banzai, thanks!