Gadgetory

hi I'm Mike broman for TechnoBuffalo and welcome to my office today's review is the Canon PowerShot ELPH 520 HS let's find out if this lustrous little elf has what it takes to satisfy your point-and-shoot needs from a design standpoint canon has done an admirable job with this little elf I really love the boxy design and it's added this lustrous iridescent coating that reacts to the sunlight the PowerShot ELPH 520 HS is very compact here it is next to an iPhone but aside from it's beautifully glossy aesthetics the Canon PowerShot ELPH 520 HS is plagued by a few design flaws first off the camera records two micro SD cards now while that might be ideal for smartphones and tablets etc it's really not that ideal for digital cameras especially users who already have built up a library of the larger standard sized SD cards they're now going to have to buy an adapter and you're also gonna have to buy new micro SD cards and that's kind of a pain in the Kiester secondly the battery on this camera is very small it's about the size of a single double-a battery with an 870 milliamp hour rating which is smaller than most cell phones needless to say and all of my testing battery life took a tumble within about 30 to 40 minutes depending on your usage this camera was giving me the stage hook and lastly Canon shuffled around the rear controls and it's a lot less intuitive so it's really not easy to make adjustments if you're used to a standard 4-way directional pad with set button in the middle although the design suffered some crucial ailments the interior of this camera was spot-on the menu system was fantastic the camera features were great too and the most important thing on this camera auto mode was fantastic on the elf 520 HS Canon actually expanded to predefined scenes 258 on this camera so that is a big boost for the manual shooter there's really not a lot you just have program auto exposure and a bunch of different scene modes and digital effects however you can adjust the white balance the ISO goes to 3200 and there's a long shutter mode that allows you to go down to 15 seconds for long exposure shooting the 5 20 HS has a 12 X optical zoom lens and that's pretty impressive given the cameras diminutive stature now for image quality this lustrous little elf has a standard one over 2.3 inch 10 megapixel CMOS sensor that employs canons HS system high sensitivity which is supposed to be better in low light unfortunately in almost all shooting environments this camera wanted to Jack the ISO up and I noticed that the ISO performance was not on par with canons of yesteryear similarly priced power shots that I've seen in the past granted at the lowest ISO settings in bright light macro shots this camera the the images are beautiful but it's really not that versatile you're gonna have to rely on the flash it's gonna want to whip that flash out in public like it's its birthday every chance it gets the elf 520 HS also captures 1080p HD videos at 24 frames per second it could do 720p at 30 frames per second it has standard definition and it also has super slow motion but it's at super small resolutions I experienced a similar result in HD videorecording low-light really took a hit and I just expected a little bit more out of this thing when it came to image quality for the average user who's gonna post to Facebook this is gonna be fine for you but if you're really serious about photography wait for the ELF 320 HS and look to canons higher models like the S 100 overall I was a bit disappointed with the Canon PowerShot ELPH 520 HS and that's a rarity when it comes to Canon cameras I don't like the micro SD cards I don't like the short battery life and I'm not a fan of the cluttered interface on the back here the camera was a little bit sluggish and I thought the image quality could have been a bit better especially when I compared it to the canons of last year for the entire review be sure to go to TechnoBuffalo comm this is Mike Pearlman signing out from my office you guys keep warm out there