Features
Playback, Edit, and Print Functions
Battery Information
Connections
Supplied Software

Features

LCD Monitor: The Canon PowerShot SX120 IS has a 3.0" low-temperature polycrystalline silicon TFT color LCD monitor featuring approximately 230,000 pixels. The monitor has a 100% picture coverage. The high-resolution screen offers a crisp, clear picture to make shooting, playback and using the camera's menu functions especially convenient. It also features Night Display for easy viewing in low light applications. When shooting in dark conditions, the camera automatically brightens the LCD monitor to suit the brightness of the subject, making it easier to frame the subject.

Note: This camera does not feature a separate viewfinder.

DIGIC 4 Image Processor with iSAPS Technology: The PowerShot SX120 IS features the DIGIC 4 Image Processor, designed to improve processing speed, image quality, and efficiency. The DIGIC 4 processor provides faster camera startup, autofocus, and playback, and assures that every image is more colorful and vibrant. The iSAPS (Intelligent Scene Analysis based on Photographic Space) technology uses an internal database of thousands of photographs to improve focus speed and accuracy, as well as exposure and white balance.

Face Detection Technology: The DIGIC 4 chip includes Face Detection Auto Focus/Auto Exposure/Flash Exposure technology. Face Detection finds all the faces in the frame and sets the most suitable focus point. Exposure and flash are controlled to ensure proper illumination of both the faces and the overall scene, eliminating the common problem of overexposed faces. The PowerShot SX120 IS also offer Face Detection WB (White Balance) which allows the camera to concentrate upon faces when calculating white balance for the best possible skin tones. In addition the digital camera features Face Select and Track which lets you highlight one face among several in a scene, and the camera will then concentrate on that one person, even as they move around the scene.

Motion Detection Technology: This sophisticated feature works in the background to instantly evaluate how fast your subject is moving. Then it automatically selects and sets the optimal exposure and ISO settings to keep everything looking sharp and clear. So whether you're shooting a bride walking down the aisle, a ballet recital or even a child's soccer game, you can relax and shoot with confidence knowing you've got the picture you intended.

Recording Media: The PowerShot A1000 IS records images on SD (Secure Digital), SDHC memory card, MMC (MultiMedia Card), MMCplus card, or HD MMCplus card. A 128 MB SD Card is included.

Image Recording Format: The camera records still images or moving images with monaural audio. Still images are recorded in JPEG format and movies are recorded in AVI format (Image data: Motion JPEG, Audio data: WAV).

Image Sensor: For optimal image quality, the camera uses a 1/2.5" CCD image sensor with approximately 10.3 million total pixels and 10.0 million effective pixels.

Still Image Resolution/Compression: There are seven still image resolutions to choose from: Large (10M): 3648 x 2736 pixels w/ 4:3 aspect ratio, Wide (7.5M): 3648 x 2048 pixels w/ 16:9 aspect ratio, Medium 1 (6M):2816 x 2112 pixels w/ 4:3 aspect ratio, Medium 2 (4M): 2272 x 1704 pixels w/ 4:3 aspect ratio, Medium 3 (2M): 1600 x 1200 pixels w/ 4:3 aspect ratio, Small (0.3M): 640 x 480 pixels w/ 4:3 aspect ratio.

Motion Video Resolution: Movies in standard resolution can be recorded up to the capacity of the memory card (4GB max) or 1 hour, whichever comes first. Movies can be shot at three different resolutions: 640 x 480 @ 30 fps (frames per second), 640 x 480 @ 30 fps LP, or 320 x 240 @ 30 fps. All movies are recorded with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Optics: The camera features a 10x optical zoom lens. The 4x digital zoom extends the telephoto capabilities to a total zoom of 40x. The digital camera allows you to adjust the Zoom between 4 settings.

• Standard: Enables shooting at zoom factors of up to 16x with digital and optical zooms combined at a focal length of 36mm to 1440mm.
• Off: Enables shooting without digital zoom with a focal length of 36mm to 360mm.
• 1.4x: Digital zoom is fixed at the select zoom factor of 1.4x for a focal length of 50.4mm to 504mm enabling faster shutter speed and less chance of camera shake.
• 2.3x: Digital zoom is fixed at the select zoom factor of 2.3x for a focal length of  82.8mm to 828mm enabling faster shutter speed and less chance of camera shake.

Optical Image Stabilizing: The Image Stabilizer function allows you to minimize the camera shake which results in blurred images when you shoot distant subjects that have been magnified or when you shoot in dark conditions. You can select Continuous stabilization, Shoot Only stabilization (active when shutter button pressed), Panning stabilization (only stabilizes vertical motion), or Off.

Continuous Shooting Mode: You can use this mode to shoot successive frames while the shutter button is fully pressed. There are three modes:

• Continuous: Records approximately 1.3 images per second, focus is fixed on the original subject distance.
• Continuous Shooting AF (auto focus): Records approximately 0.9 images per second, focus adjusts as needed.
• Continuous LV (live view): Records approximately 0.9 images per second, focus is fixed at a manual setting.

Self-Timer: The self-timer starts when the shutter button is pressed. The delay time can be set to 10 seconds, 2 seconds, Custom, or Face Self-Timer. The Custom Timer allows you to choose a timer delay setting of 0-10, 15, 20, or 30 seconds and the number of shots, up to 10. The Face Self-Timer will not shoot until after a new face is detect within the composition. You can change the number of shots for the Face Self-Timer from 1-10.

Note: If the camera does not detect a new face within 30 seconds during the Face Self-Timer, the camera will automatically release the shutter.

AutoFocus Modes: The camera utilizes TTL (through-the-lens) automatic focusing with two auto focus modes:

• Continuous: The camera is constantly focusing wherever it is aimed, even when the shutter button is not pressed.
• Single: The camera only focuses when the shutter button is pressed halfway, conserving battery power.

AutoFocus Area Modes:  The camera features two area focusing methods:

• Face Detect: The camera automatically detects the position of a face and uses the data to set the focus and exposure while shooting; the digital camera can recognize up to 9 faces.
• Face Select: You can choose a specific person's face to focus on and then shoot. Even if the subject moves, the face frame will follow the subject with a certain range.
• Center: The camera fixes the AF frame at the center; this is recommended when the target subject is at the center of the composition.

AF Zoom: You can zoom the display of the AF frame to check focus when shooting or right after taking a shot.

AF-Assist Beam: The AF-assist beam will sometimes emit when the shutter button is pressed halfway to assist focusing in certain conditions, i.e. dark conditions. The AF-assist beam can be turned off. If animals are your subject, turn off the beam when shooting in the dark to avoid startling them.

Manual Focus: You can select a Manual Focus mode if you want more control, or cannot achieve a good focus automatically. When in the Manual Focus mode a magnified image appears in the center frame on the monitor and a scale is displayed to indicate the approximate focal distance.

Focus Lock: If it becomes difficult to focus on the subject due to low contrast to the surroundings, close up and far away subjects in the same shot, or quickly moving subjects, you can choose to lock the focus or auto focus on an object at a similar distance, then shoot the picture after recomposing the shot.

Focusing Range: The camera features the following focus ranges:

• Normal: Use this mode when the distance from the end of the lens to the subject is 1.6' to infinity (W), 3.3' to infinity (T)
• Macro Mode: You can shoot an object at a close distance or approach an object to shoot close-up. The focusing range from the end of the lens  0.4" to 1.6' (W)
• Manual Focus: In this mode the camera can focus from 0.4" to infinity (W), 3.3' to infinity (T)
• Easy: In  Easy mode the camera can focus from 2.0" to infinity (W), 3.3' to infinity (T)

Shooting Modes: Using the Mode Dial on the top of the camera, you can select from numerous shooting modes:

• Easy: This mode automatically sets every camera control, including the flash, to reduce blur and improve image quality. It is recommended for beginners to avoid confusion.
• Auto: The Auto Mode recognizes typical shooting scenes, and detects faces, brightness, colors, distance and movement without the need to switch modes.
• Smart Auto: Smart Auto detects and analyzes faces, brightness, colors, distance, and movement, then compensates and enhances to make every image the best it can be by selecting an appropriate setting for the scene. Advanced Canon technology intelligently analyzes your situation and shooting conditions, then it automatically selects an appropriate setting from 18 specially defined settings.
• Creative Zone: The camera also features manual and semi-manual shooting modes.
  • Program AE (P): the camera automatically sets both the aperture and the shutter speed
  • Shutter Speed Priority (Tv): when you set the shutter speed, the camera sets the aperture
  • Aperture Priority (Av): when you set the aperture, the camera sets the shutter speed
  • Manual (M): you manually set the aperture and the shutter speed
• Image Zone: The Image Zone modes provide the appropriate settings for specific shooting conditions.
  • Portrait: softens the background and makes the subject stand out
  • Landscape: optimized for shooting landscape scenes with near and far subjects
  • Night Snapshot: for snapshots of people against twilight or night backgrounds by reducing the effect of camera shake, even without a tripod
  • Kid & Pets: capture subjects that move around
  • Indoor: maintains true color under fluorescent of incandescent lighting
• Special Scene: The camera's Special Scene modes provide optimum settings for various scenes.
  • Night Scene: captures subject and darker background
  • Foliage: shot leaves and flowers in vivid color
  • Snow: subject against a white background
  • Beach: subject against reflected light
  • Fireworks: fireworks against a dark sky
  • Sunset: allows you to shoot sunsets in vivid colors
  • Aquarium: fish, etc in an indoor aquarium
  • ISO 3200: sets ISO speed to 3200 and increases the shutter speed to minimize blurring of moving subjects and from camera shake, even in low light conditions; recording pixels are fixed at 1600 x 1200
• Movie: Shoot in VGA (640 x 480 at 30 fps/30 fps LP), QVGA (320 x 240 at 30 fps) for up to 1 hour or 4GB.

i-Contrast: The camera can detect areas in the scene, such as faces or backgrounds, that are too bright or dark and automatically adjust them to the optimum brightness when shooting. Also, when the overall image is lacking in contrast, the camera will automatically correct the image for a sharper impression when shooting.

Exposure Compensation: When shooting against a bright or dark background, you may need to correct the exposure so that the subject is correctly lit. Set from -2 to +2 in 1/3-stop increments.

Locking the Exposure Setting (AE Lock): You can set the exposure and focus separately. This is effective when the contrast is too strong between the subject and background, or when a subject is backlit.

Metering Modes: You can select from the following metering modes:

• Evaluative Light Metering: Used for standard conditions, the area within the frame is divided into several zones and light is measured based on subject position, brightness, direct light, and backlighting.
• Center-Weighted Averaging: Averages the exposure from the entire image, but places more weight on the subject at the center.
• Spot AE Point: Meters the area within the spot metering frame at the center of the LCD monitor.

ISO 1600: The PowerShot SX120 IS features ISO 1600 and High ISO Auto settings that reduce the effects of camera shake and sharpen subjects in low-light situations with high shutter speeds, giving you greater flexibility for shooting. ISO speed settings include 80, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, High-ISO Auto, or Auto.

Flash Modes: The PowerShot SX120 IS has a built-in flash which can be manually opened or closed as needed. When the flash is open, you can choose whether the flash will fire with every shot or will fire automatically depending on the light level. When closed, the flash will not fire. The built-in flash has a range of 1.6-13' at wide-angle and 3.3-8.2' at maximum telephoto. The In the menu, you can select the following flash functions:

• Red-Eye Correction: Automatically searches for and correct red eyes in the image when the flash fires.
• Slow-Synchro: the flash is used with slow shutter speeds, this reduces the chance that the background will appear dark when a person is photographed at night or under artificial light
• Safety FE: The camera automatically changes the shutter speed or aperture value when the flash fires to avoid overexposing and blowing out the highlights in the scene.
• Flash Exposure Compensation: Settings can be adjusted in 1/3-stop increments from -2 to +2 stops.
• Flash Output: The built-in flash output can be manually set to one of three levels.

Flash Exposure Lock (FE Lock): You can lock the flash exposure so the exposure settings are correctly adjusted for a particular portion of the subject.

White Balance: You can choose from the following white balance settings:

• Auto: The camera sets the white balance automatically according to shooting conditions.
• Daylight: For recording outdoors on a bright day.
• Cloudy: For recording under overcast, shady or twilight skies.
• Tungsten: For recording under tungsten and bulb-type 3-wavelength fluorescent lighting.
• Fluorescent: For recording under warm-white, cool-white or warm-white (3-wavelength) fluorescent lighting.
• Fluorescent H: For recording under daylight fluorescent, or daylight fluorescent-type (3-wavelength) fluorescent lighting.
• Custom: Allows you to manually set the white balance and store the settings.

My Colors: Using My Colors you can easily change colors in an image when it's taken. My Colors offers several options:

• Vivid: Emphasizes contrast and color saturation to record bold colors.
• Neutral: Tones down contrast and color saturation to record neutral hues.
• Sepia: Brownish tint.
• B/W: Black and white.
• Custom Color: Manually adjust the contrast, sharpness, and color saturation.
• My Colors Off: Records normally with this setting.

Display Overlay: You can display vertical and horizontal grid lines, a 3:2 print area guide or both on the LCD monitor while shooting to help check the position of your subject.

Histogram: The histogram is a graph that allows you to check the brightness of an image.

Playback, Edit, and Print Functions

Auto Rotate Function: The PowerShot SX120 IS's Auto Rotate function uses an Intelligent Orientation sensor to sense whether your images were shot horizontally or vertically. During playback, the camera automatically rotates the image to the correct viewing orientation in the display.

Review: After an image is recorded, it will appear in the LCD monitor for a preset number of seconds for reviewing. You can select the review time from 2 to 10 seconds. It will also display as long as you hold the shutter button down.

Focus Check Display: Focus Check display allows you to check the focus of image taken and allows you to easily check facial expressions and whether a subject's eyes are closed.  This feature can be set to allow you to check the focus of an image taken right after shooting the subject.

Jump Images: When you have a lot of images recorded onto a memory card, you can use the Jump feature to speed up your search for the image you want to view. You can choose from the following Jump functions.

• Jump 10 Images: Jumps over 10 images at a time.
• Jump 100 Images: Jumps over 100 images at a time.
• Shot Date: Jumps to the firs image of each shooting date.
• Jump to First: Jump to still images only.
• Jump to Movie: Jumps to a movie.

Index Replay: This feature allows you to view 4-130 images at once on the LCD monitor so that you can search for an image quickly.

Image Magnification: When viewing a still picture in Single Image Replay mode, you can magnify the image up to approximately 10x. You can also maneuver around in the magnified picture by using the multi-purpose control dial.

Rotating Images: You can rotate an image by 90° or 270° clockwise in the LCD monitor.

Slide Show: Images stored on a memory card can be automatically displayed one after another using the Auto Play function. Each image is displayed approximately 3 seconds and you can choose the type of transition between pictures.

Movie Playback: In addition to normal playback of your video clips the camera features slow-motion, fast-forward, rewind and frame-by-frame playback.

Red-Eye Correction: You can correct red eyes in already recorded images. However, red eyes may not be automatically detected in some images such as faces near the screen edge, faces that appear extremely small, larger dark or bright in relation to the overall image and faces turned to the side or at a diagonal and faces with a portion hidden which prevents the Red-Eye Correction form working.

Resizing Images: You can resize images to a lower pixel setting and save the resized image as a separate files.

Protecting Images: The protect feature allows you to protect important images from accidental erasure.

PictBridge/Direct Print: Using the supplied USB cable, you can connect this camera directly to a PictBridge-compatible printer of any brand, or a Canon printer that supports the Direct Print function. You can also connect the camera directly to certain Canon Bubble Jet printers. In this way, you can make prints directly from the camera without having to hook it up to a computer.

Exif Print (Exif 2.2): The Canon PowerShot SX120 IS conforms to "Exif Print", a worldwidestandard. Vital camera settings (such as: exposure mode, white balance, exposure time) and scene data are recorded to the image file when it is captured. Printers compatible with "Exif Print" are able to use this information to produce high quality photographs, exactly the way they were intended at the time of capture. This intelligent communication process also allows the printer to correct for poor lighting or mistakes, resulting in photos that can be even better than the originals.

DPOF Compatible: On your SD Memory card, you can select which image or images you want to print and how many copies you want. This is convenient for printing images all at once on optional photo printers or at participating photo labs. You can use the camera to specify settings for images that you wish to download to a computer. The settings used on the camera comply with the Digital Print Order Format (DPOF) standards. A maximum of 998 images can be selected per SD card, and are transferred in order from oldest to newest by shooting date.

Battery Information

Power Requirements: The Canon PowerShot SX120 IS powered by 2 "AA" alkaline batteries (supplied). You can also use optional Nickel-Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) rechargeable batteries. For long periods of continuous use, or when connected to a computer, it is recommended that the camera be connected to the optional ACK800 AC adapter kit (available from the manufacturer). The typical performance of the batteries are as follows:

Auto Power Down Function: In Shooting Mode, the power will automatically turn off approximately 3 minutes after the last function is accessed. In Playback Mode, the power will automatically turn off approximately 5 minutes after the last function is accessed. You can also set the time the LCD stays on after the last function; 10, 20, or 30 seconds, 1, 2, or 3 minutes.

Note: The Auto Power Down Function will not activate during a Slide Show or while the camera is connected to a computer.

Connections:

Digital/AV Output Terminal: The PowerShot SX120 IS has a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed terminal to allow you to connect the camera to a compatible computer or compatible printer via the supplied USB cable. The camera's USB 2.0 output also allows you to connect the camera to a TV or video monitor with a RCA audio and composite video input jacks using the supplied audio/video cable. You can set the video output to NTSC or PAL.

DC In: The camera features a DC input for optional AC power adapter (ACK800, sold separately).

Supplied Software

Included Software: The PowerShot SX120 IS comes supplied with the Canon Digital Camera Solution Disk Ver. 48.0 CD-ROM. It contains the following programs:

• Canon Utilities:
  • Windows:
    • ZoomBrowser EX 6.4: downloads, displays, organizes and edits your recorded images
    • PhotoStitch 3.1: use to merge still images to make panoramas
  • Macintosh:
    • ImageBrowser 6.4: downloads, displays, organizes and edits your recorded images
    • PhotoStitch 3.2: use to merge still images to make panoramas
• User Guides: Software Starter Guide, Personal Printing Guide

Minimum System Requirements: