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One of the best features of this camera is it’s powerful zoom. It is ideal for taking wildlife photos for instance. The resolution of the photos is quite surprising, it takes high resolution photos even from great distances, allowing you to crop them and still have a brilliant result.

The Canon PowerShot SX20IS 12.1MP Digital Camera can be set to Smart AUTO which means that the camera will figure out all settings on its own while you can pay more attention to the model or the scene you want to photograph. This feature makes it ideal for beginner photographers.

Another great feature of the camera is its 2.5-inch Vari-Angle LCD that helps you a lot when taking a photo or when viewing the photos you have taken. It also has a 20x Optical Zoom lens that has 5.0-100mm focal length, ideal for wide angle and telephoto scenes as well. With an optical image stabilizer all photos taken with this camera will be clear and crisp, even if your hand is shaking or the models are moving.

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Over the years, Minolta (after its merger with Konica dubbed Konica-Minolta) has produced many legendary names such as the DiMage series, the Dynax series or the Maxxum. Although the Alpha system bears the Sony name, its origin lays within a project of the Konica-Minolta laboratories dating 2005. After Sony acquired the photography division of Konica-Minolta, the Alpha project was pushed up resulting in the 2006 launch of the Sony Alpha 100.

The Sony Alpha 100 was a pretty advanced piece of technology at its time and although it’s been discontinued, it still holds its ground today.

The features of the Sony Alpha systems are not to be disregarded. It was the second system to use an image stabilization system based in the body (in truth, it should’ve been the first but Pentax released theirs earlier), allowing the use of image stabilization with any lens. Secondly, it used a technology called Eye-Start, which allows the camera to start focusing when it senses the photographer’s eye close to the viewfinder, saving time. Also innovative was the camera’s ability to clean the sensor by shaking it before being turned off.

Probably the best advantage of the Sony Alpha, however, is its support for legacy Minolta and Konica-Minolta lenses. Thus, a photographer can save money by buying old real glass lenses at a cheap price.

The system is not without downsides though, as it tends to overprocess images. The Sony Alpha’s performance at high ISO sensibility settings is also extremely poor, resulting in noisy unclear images. Although the latter is improved in more recent models, with Sony Alpha 100 one couldn’t correct this even when shooting RAW images.

The Sony Alpha system is definitely a contender on the market today, giving the elders (Pentax, Canon, Nikon) a run for their money. If Sony would consider lowering its prices we would definitely witness a turn in the digital camera market.

However, keeping an eye out for little camera lens gems that come at low prices is always a good idea since you never know when luck strikes. We, at bestcamerareviews.org, have found such a gem in the c for the Canon EOS mount.

This little Sigma lens packs quite some physical features, offering wide-angle performance at 18mm with the luminous f2.8 value. It accepts 67mm filters, it focuses at the minimum distance of 30cm and offers a fair magnification value of 1:4, which is quite acceptable since it’s definitely not a macro lens. This Sigma camera lens offers Optical Stabilization (OS – which can be turned on or off via a small switch on the lens). As such it has a number of extra mobile elements, bringing the total to 16 elements in 12 groups. In addition to this, the HyperSonic Motor (HSM) makes focusing extremely fast and incredibly silent. The optical system of this camera lens is also endowed with SPecial Low Dispersion (SLD) and Extraodinary Low Dispersion (ELD) glass elements which help reduce optical abberations, resulting in sharp and detailed images. All these features do come with a price however since the lens, although fairly compact, is rather heavy, weighing in 400 grams.

Working with the lens is quite a pleasure (test images will come soon) and the quality of the images is unbelievable given the price of the lens. The Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8-4 DC OS HSM lens for Canon’s EOS system is perfect for portraits and landscapes, offering great quality and colors. Most of the time the focus is amazingly accurate, though we noticed that after heavy use the lens eventually will refuse to focus and it will take a camera restart to convince it to focus again. In addition, low light focus works perfectly but the lens is easily fooled by white surfaces regardless of lighting conditions. A minor inconvenience may be noted in the fact that the f2.8 can only be attained up to 20mm focal distance, beyond that it steadily increases towards 4 (through camera settings it can go all the way to f11).

Overall, we can say that the Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8-4 DC OS HSM lens for Canon EOS is a real bang for the buck, its performance being well beyond its pricing (around $200 at most online camera stores).

On the other hand, the disadvantages are also important:
the lack of a mirror chamber nullifies the main advantage of the DSLR: having an optic view of the scene to be shot, instead of an imprecise electronic view filtered through the sensor.
basically you’re buying a very specialized camera whenever you buy a lens. Given how expensive the system is and the fact that you’re missing an optical viewfinder anyway, it might be better to simply buy a compact camera each time.
the people with the money to invest in photographic systems: professionals and advanced amateurs will not be interested in giving up the bright optical viewfinder.
the system doesn’t have many lenses at the moment on the market, it will be interesting to see whether Ricoh will manage to push the system until they will have enough lenses to compete with the likes of Canon or Nikon.
A system based on the old film photography would’ve made more sense – split in three parts: body, changeable sensor and changeable lens

After Olympus brought the micro four-thirds system in a bid to counteract the bulk of the DSLR cameras on the market, it is no doubt refreshing to see another innovation being pushed forward. After all, it is clear that innovation usually comes from small companies which have nothing to lose by experimentation. Although it’s unlikely these systems will win the hearts of advanced photographers, it will be interesting to see where they are headed.

Ever since the introduction of the Digital Rebel XSi (also known as 450D), Canon has pushed the Digital Rebel series closer to its mid-range series (denoted by two digits, such as 40D, 50D), using elements such as moving from the usage of Compact Flash (CF) cards towards Secure Digital (SD) cards, upgrading the sensor, enlarging the viewfinder and many others.

The latest member of the Digital Rebel family is the Digital Rebel T2i (also known as 550D or the Digital Kiss X4) and comes to further the dominion of Canon with many new improvements. Since the camera was only announced in February 2010, we will look around at what novelties Canon is offering.

The first is a much-expected improvement in the building of the body. All the previous models, including the current 450D and 500D, had bodies made of plastic parts attached to a stainless steel chassis. In the 550D, the stainless steel chassis remains, but the outer body is made from polycarbonate resins and fiberglass. This is a great move from Canon especially since its main competitor Nikon has been using magnesium alloys for quite a while now in its entry level products.

As any good upgrade dictates, one of the improvements is the sensor. The number of megapixels in itself is definitely not the most important quality of a camera (as any experienced photographer will tell you) but having 18 megapixels under your finger will definitely help in some situations. However, the jump to 18 megapixels is definitely not the most significant upgrade the sensor received. In addition, the improved DIGIC 4 (which is a step beyond 500D and a close relative to the one used on the professional series 7D) boasts gapless microlenses, which allow for increased density of both microlenses and photodiodes on the sensor as well as increasing the efficiency of each pixel.

The screen received a minor upgrade, by getting a 3:2 aspect ratio (although the resolution and size of 3 inches remain the same as on the 500D). This moved is aimed at pleasing movie makers (as both 500D and 550D are able to record HD video) for whom a wider aspect ratio makes much more sense).

A much more important improvement is the upgrade of the metering system to one based on a 63-zone dual-layer sensor. The new division (also present on the professional 7D) allows for much more accurate metering, while the two layers work to reduce the overall sensitivity to the red color spectrum which plagues the classic metering systems.

The last on our list of improvements are the labeling of the ISO value 6400 as a main ISO setting. On the 500D, this value was considered to be an “extended” value (meaning that the user would use it while running the risk of getting extremely noisy images). Apparently Canon gained enough confidence in the improved DIGIC 4 in order to allow us to use ISO 6400 as a normal setting. An “extended” value is still present though, namely ISO 12800.

In addition, exposure compensation moved up, allowing us to choose any value between -5 and +5 exposure values (EV). Before, Canon has been widely criticized for limiting exposure compensation to -2/+2. Since most Digital Rebels have the tendency to overexpose, many photographers choose -1 EV as the default exposure compensation value (instead of the normal 0, the neutral value), thus greatly limiting the ability to further underexpose for artistic effects.

As we can see, the new member of the Digital Rebel family looks promising and unlike the previous upgrade from 450D to 500D, this time there are many reasons to upgrade. The metering value, the new ISO setting and the exposure compensation may be the main incentives to sell your old Rebels and get the new one (once it is launched). As a fairly famous photographer used to say: having the best camera doesn’t make you a great photographer, but it sure helps.

Don’t let other brand loyalists sway you away from Pentax. You can buy EXCELLENT vintage lenses for these cameras. Manual focus is truly where it is at, at least for me. If you do not agree, Pentax has plenty of new AF lenses to suit anyone. However, excellent manual focus optics are easy enough to try for much less money than newer lenses of any brand. Nobody….. and I do mean NOBODY else offers the total lens compatibility of millions of vintage lenses available only to Pentax users. This particular camera is one hell of a buy. I had the money to buy a D5000 or D90 if that is what I wanted. When it comes to Image Quality, I feel I bought every bit is much camera without sacrificing any features that were important to me. This camera takes beautiful pictures and I have only scratched the surface of its abilities. The two lens package (18-55 and 55-300) was an unbelievable deal at $643. Amazon delivered the camera WAY ahead of the crazy shipment date they list. Do not hesitate. If you are considering this package, pull the trigger. Do a keyword search to find online Pentax Forums if you need more information about Pentax products.