canon sd850 vs sony w80: revisted

People have complained about the soft looking images that the Sony w80 puts out, likely due to high noise reduction in the camera. Nobody has really made the same complaint about the SD850. So just out of curiosity, I decided to do a little A/B testing on test photos taken in good lighting from Digital Imaging's website. Though test shots did look different, the difference was pretty minimal.

Furthermore, these test shots were taken at 7+ megapixels, whereas I have previously argued that 4 mega pixels all that's really needed. If you resize the images down to 4 megapixels, I found they looked even sharper (unsurprising), and that there was even less evidence that the Sony camera was soft compared to the Canon.

I also looked at images taken with higher ISO (simulating a low-light situation) from DC resources. Here I just looked at the images resized down to 1280x1024. The Sony W80 clearly looked better. At that size, there was an equal amount of detail in the images, but the Sony had much more pleasant color. At full zoom, however, it was true that the SD850 did better in fine detail (such as allowing you to read fine print that was obscured by the W80). But you'll never see those fine details unless you crop your photos or zoom in on detail when viewing them on your monitor.

Conclusion: the Sony W80 may be a better buy than the online reviews suggest.