Canon Powershot Pro1

Posted by T3 Online on Tue 5 Oct 2004

Only an amateur would think this is pro

What if you want the power and features of a digital SLR but still have a hankering for movie modes and framing by LCD? Canon hopes you'll spare a thought for its latest SLR-alike, the eight-megapixel Pro1 with its 7x zoom. This solid (550g) camera has a folding screen and a handy wide-angle lens setting. As with any long zoom, this suffers from purple fringing and some distortion near the edges. It's also controlled electronically by a fragile zoom ring that's no substitute for a normal SLR zoom.

The rest of the interface isn't much better, with soggy navigation keys, sluggish menus and an awkwardly placed manual focus button. The sharp, fast two-inch LCD wins back some points and the electronic viewfinder is also well designed. There are auto and scene modes, plus technical features galore. But if there's one attribute that all professionals demand, it's speed, and here the Pro1 stumbles badly. This model takes up to 20 seconds to save one full-quality image to its 64MB card, and up to five seconds to play it back. In burst mode, you can shoot just six frames over three seconds and even the movie mode is limited to 15 frames per second. The excellent images are worth the wait, as they're bursting with colour, contrast and sharp detail. But when you can get a real digital SLR - Canon's own EOS 300D (T3 93, 5/5) - for the same price, it's difficult to see the logic in buying something as ponderous and inflexible as this, no matter how good its lens and sensor.