This first shot was taken with the SX200 IS zoomed-out and set to its lowest 80 ISO sensitivity. Under these bright conditions it represents a best-case scenario, and the crops are certainly sharp and detailed, with only the faintest smattering of noise textures in shadow areas. As you move towards the edges of the frame though, there’s evidence of coloured fringing in areas of high contrast.

Landscape: 4.56MB, Program, 1/800, f4, 100 ISO, 5-60mm at 5mm (28mm equivalent)

						Another shot taken under bright light with the lens zoomed-out and the sensitivity nudged up to 100 ISO. Viewed at 100%, the image is pretty sharp with lots of fine detail and no softening in the corners, although the flat areas of blue sky reveal a slight increase in visible noise textures to the pixel peepers out there. We shot this at a low angle and while the screen has a wide viewing angle, it can become harder to view in direct sunlight.

Landscape: 3.51MB, Program, 1/1600, f5.3, 200 ISO, 5-60mm at 60mm (336mm equivalent)

There’s some coloured fringing around high contrast areas towards the edges, but it’s never worse than seen in the bottom crop.

Like most compacts, the increase to 200 ISO has also resulted in greater noise textures and a softening of ultimate detail.

Set to Auto ISO, the SX200 IS selected 200 ISO due to the long focal length despite bright conditions. The crops are again pretty detailed, but as above, there’s visible noise and a softening of edges

Face detection locked-onto the subject and IS allowed us to easily frame the shot despite the long focal length. We also used a fill-in flash.

Like other 200 ISO samples here, there’s some visible noise and softened edges, but we did manage to blur the background a little.

We used the former here as we couldn’t get any closer to the circuit board.

The result shows sharp details in the plane of focus, and less fringing towards the corners, compared to many cameras in the same conditions.

The subject matter here has been quite forgiving to the increase to 400 ISO.

Viewed at 100% there’s still lots of detail and the image is well-corrected into the corners, but there’s a visible increase in noise levels over the 200 ISO samples, and once again a reduction in edge definition.

It’s still ok for smaller prints, but pixel-peepers or those wanting larger prints will want to stick to lower sensitivities.

As you’d expect, there’s another increase in noise artefacts and the noise reduction has stepped-up a gear with some smearing as a result.

But the crops do still contain a reasonable amount of detail and it’s certainly not a dramatic drop beyond 400 ISO. Still best-reserved for smaller prints though.

Like most compacts, 1600 ISO is a step too far and should only be used for emergencies, or very small reproductions.

The SX200 IS then goes onto offer a 3200 ISO option as a Scene Preset, albeit at a greatly reduced resolution of 2 Megapixels. You can see a sample of it and other sensitivities in our High ISO Noise results page. There you’ll also see how it compares to arch-rival, Panasonic’s TZ7 / ZS3.