Six weeks ago I wrote about my plan to get a Powershot SX170 as a replacement for the little Ixus camera I had. I am now following through with that plan as the model has been officially withdrawn in NZ. Fortunately LV Martins / Smiths City still have a few as just about everyone else has sold out.
The Powershot SX170 is now a two year old model. Its replacement was the SX600 which came out a few months after it at the beginning of 2014, although the SX170 was still in production at the time. The SX600 has since been replaced by the SX610 while no new SX170 equivalent has appeared in the Canon lineup. There are quite a few key differences in the SX6xx range compared to the SX1xx range. one of the most important being the lack of manual controls, and the design layout being much more closely aligned to the more expensive SX2xx /7xx series (which does have manual controls, and also a higher spec processor, among other features).
Clearly Canon has determined that the market position previously filled by the SX1xx series as a budget camera with manual controls can now be replaced by a lower spec version of the SX2xx/7xx series with similar overall design. It is interesting how these things go in cycles, in that an earlier series of Powershot A cameras had manual controls before Canon dropped such models from their range – and then reintroduced the capabilities with the SX100 in 2007, while the auto-only versions of the Powershot A range continued for a few more years thereafter. As it turns out, there are no competing models in that price range which also have manual controls, for the time being.
The main advantage of the SX170 over the SX100-160 range is the use of lithium batteries in the 170 which frees one from the tyranny associated with AA batteries that have no battery level meter available and have an all-too-common tendency to go flat at the most inconvenient time due to loss of capacity. Naturally I have found the Eneloop batteries the most dependable in that regard, but have lost track of how much I have forked out for in batteries over the ten years since I bought my first AA battery camera, the Powershot S1. That included a couple of Maha Powerex fast chargers to bring the batteries up to charge quickly since standard chargers are uninspiringly slow with their 16-18 hour cycle time.
So I guess I will have this thing next week and away we go.