Canon PowerShot SD450 Digital Elph

If your definition of perfection is a pocket sized digital camera that's equally handy at taking pictures and shooting video, then stop searching and buy Canon's new PowerShot SD450 Digital Elph.

The SD450 lives up to the Elph name; it's about the same size and weight as a deck of playing cards and slips almost invisibly into your pocket, yet this digicam captures pristine five-megapixel images.

The back of the camera is almost entirely consumed by a large 2.5-inch LCD display. Canon even includes an optical viewfinder, which can boost your battery life from about 200 to 500 shots per charge.

The camera's controls are wedged into a narrow strip of real estate, and the zoom control is integrated into a ring that wraps around the shutter release. Our initial impression was that the tightly clustered controls were a bit uncomfortable to handle. In short order, everything felt pretty natural under our fingers.

A slider instantly switches from Photo to Playback to Video Recording mode, and most common functions are handled by a five-way control dial. Despite the camera's tiny size, a smart layout makes it virtually impossible to accidentally obscure the flash when taking a picture, and tiny feet make the camera stand on its bottom or side to take a picture with the self timer (assuming you aren't using a tripod).

The SD450 springs to life in a little over a second and it captures about two frames per second. There's an almost imperceptible shutter lag when the lens has pre-focused. Most photographers will no doubt leave the camera in Auto mode most of the time. The auto photos exhibited good saturation and surprisingly little noise.

To tailor the shot to the environment, the SD450 sports 11 scene modes for all of the most common shooting situations (and a few uncommon ones, like Underwater, using the optional underwater housing). The badly named Manual mode is really a programmed exposure mode. It selects the exposure, but you can override its choices with exposure compensation and white balance adjustments.

The stitch assist feature provides on-screen guides to shoot a series of images for panoramic stitching on the PC. When you turn on stitch assist, the camera locks exposure and white balance for better panoramas. If you're willing to dive deep into the menus, details like the metering system and color bias are adjustable. For extra help, enable the onscreen grid when composing photos.

In addition to the impressive stills, the SD450 captures full-screen video with sound: a full 640 x 480-pixels at 30 frames per second. You can record up to 1GB of video per clip. Even when played full screen on a PC and TV, the video was crisp and smooth, so good that it might be mistaken for footage recorded by a camcorder. Unlike some cameras that lock out most of the controls when recording video, the Elph allows zooming while filming.

Overall, the SD450 is an impressive pocket camera that never makes you wait. It takes the best pictures and video of any model in its class and offers an unbeatable combination of style and ease of use.