Canon PowerShot SD4500 IS: Video and Image Quality

Video Quality
The SD4500 takes excellent quality HD videos at 1920x1080 resolution at 24 frames per second. Optical zoom can be used. The stereo audio is also top notch. In the following recording, the movement of the train is very smooth and the sound comes through loud and clear.

Recording will automatically stop when either the file size reaches 4GB or the recording time reaches approximately 10 minutes (in HD mode) or 1 hour (in standard definition mode).

Image Quality
The SD4500 IS produced very pleasing images in good light, with strong colors. Its low light images were good as well. As is always the case with Canon point-and-shoot cameras, the Canon SD4500 IS produced very attractive macro shots (it can focus as close as 3mm)

If for some reason you don't care for the standard colors, you can select among vivid, neutral, sepia, black and white and positive film.

Normal	Vivid
Neutral	Sepia
Black and White	Positive Film

The SD4500 has a function called i-contrast, which will even out areas that have too much contrast. It works reasonably well.

i-contrast Off

i-contrast On

The SD4500 has white balance settings for auto, daylight, cloudy, tungsten, two types of fluorescent and custom. I used auto white balance with almost all of my pictures and found it to be very accurate overall, as demonstrated by the image below using the fluorescent setting.

Auto White Balance, 5500k incandescent light

The flash of the SD4500 IS has ten settings, Auto, On, Slow Synchro, Off, FE Lock, Auto Red-Eye Correction, Red-Eye Reduction, Shutter Sync, Safety FE, Smart Flash Exposure. The figures for flash range given by Canon are 12 inches to 12 feet at wide angle and 3.3 feet to 6.6 feet at telephoto. The flash worked well and produced output that was appropriate for the lighting conditions. However flash recycling times were slow - it took at least five seconds for the camera to be ready for use after a flash had been fired.

Canon's back-illuminated sensor seems to have improved the quality of the low light pictures compared to Canon's other point-and-shoot cameras. As the ISO table shows, image quality with good color was excellent through 200 ISO.

ISO 125	ISO 125, 100% crop
ISO 200	ISO 200, 100% crop
ISO 400	ISO 400, 100% crop
ISO 800	ISO 800, 100% crop
ISO 1600	ISO 1600, 100% crop
ISO 3200	ISO 3200, 100% crop

It declined slightly at 400 ISO and again at 800 and 1600 ISO. Image quality deteriorated drastically at 3200 ISO, but that setting will probably never be used.

ISO 800

ISO 800

Additional Sample Images