The Canon Powershot SD880 IS is an ultra-compact with a stabilized wide-angle lens. This used to be a rare thing but now many manufacturers offer this. The SD880 features a 4X optical zoom from 28 to 112mm in 35mm equivalent terms.

 

The Canon Powershot SD880 IS is a digital camera that gets a lot of things right. Speed of operation is great and so are ergonomics with one minor exception, the lack of a hand-gripping surface on the front. The LCD screen is probably the best in its class. Image quality only shows two serious defects, a limited dynamic range and visible vignetting at wide-angle. If it was not for those defects, the SD880 would have obtained our highest rating. The rest of image quality is rather good for an ultra-compact: sharpness is good, colors are nicely saturated, noise is relatively low until ISO 400, optical distortion is low and chromatic aberrations are rare.

 

Among wide-angle ultra-compacts, only the Fuji Finepix F100fd is clearly ahead with better low-light (high-ISO) performance, a wider dynamic range, better optics and similar speed of operation, although the Canon SD880 does certain things faster. The main advantage of the SD800 IS over the Fuji F100fd is that it is much easier to use. Those who read our full-review of the F100fd will know that that camera's interface can be quite frustrating at times.