Sample Videos from my Canon SD890 - Kris Nelson Photography

As a follow up to my post on my first photos with the Canon SD890, I thought I’d upload and share a few of the video clips I’ve shot with it and help give you an idea of what’s is capable of, and what it’s not.

The first one I shot was taken back in September, when it was still nice out here in Chicago. A little background, a few coworkers and I spent most of the summer rollerblading during our lunch break, and this little clip was me following them down the overpass on our normal route. As you can tell, the audio isn’t that great on a windy day when you’re whizzing down a fairly steep hill, but it kind of clears up near the end.

The video quality, however, isn’t that terrible at all considering the amount of action and motion in this clip. There’s noticable degredation because of it being compressed for online viewing (in this case, by Flickr), but playback on the camera itself or on your computer right from the memory card is amazingly crisp. Of course, your milage might vary and it will also depend on the hardware you’re viewing it on and what your expectations of “good video quality” is.

This next shot is a little less exciting, but I felt it was a good baseline to get a sense of what something closer to a still life or shooting a fixed subject would be like in comparison to the first one. Again, the difference in video quality is less when compressed for online viewing than it would be just on your computer and unprocessed. Still not that terrible for a photo camera.

Again, these are just a few, hopefully helpful, examples of what the Canon SD890 can do with it’s built-in video mode. Since the majority of my time the past 2 years have been spent with my Canon EOS 20D, I don’t have a lot of history shooting video with other digital cameras to compare it to. My wife’s older Nikon E5600, however, does shoot video as well, so I’ll make a point of tracking down a few of those clips to post and compare with.

From a spec standpoint, the Canon SD890 records in the standard AVI video format with only Mono audio. You can find out a little bit more (but not much) on the official Canon specs for this camera. They don’t call out the video very often, since it’s likely just an afterthought.