MCINNEY ON A CRAPPY CAMERA
JULY 11, 2026
MCKINNEY, TX
CANON POWERSHOT SX170 IS
Point and shoots are back in style…or “digicams”, like everyone on the internet is calling them. Is that a silly name? What do you guys think?
For the sake of having a pocketable street shooter, I buckled to the trend and snagged a used Canon Powershot SX170 IS for $200 in Houston. It was an impulse buy because…frankly….that week was a rough week, and spending money on dumb toys sometimes feels good. It was the only available old-school point and shoot the store had, so I had zero expectations for the little Canon going into the purchase.
The camera’s a crap experience, to be honest. It’s slow, the screen isn’t accurate (especially for contrast, oh my LORD it’s TERRIBLE), and the number of times I wished for an EVF outweighed the number of times I wished it was the weekend in a typical work week. But, to my surprise, the images didn’t suck. It was genuinely surprising.
Cameras like this usually suffer from seriously nasty JPG compression, which usually *ahem* “funkies” up the details in a way that makes them look blocky when pixel peeping. Most people don’t generally notice this or care about it at a glance, but I am what’s called a “hole-of-the-arse-type” about that because I do notice it at a glance…usually. Perfectionist tendencies, perhaps? Definitely a vice. I should probably see a priest about that.
Anyway, to my surprise, the photos actually glowed with a generous amount of charm. The imperfections in the sharpness, slight grain, and narrow dynamic range did have a fun sort of filmy quality to them straight out of camera. It made me a believer in the trend. Passing them through Adobe Lightroom made them even more fun, because they ended up looking even more filmy after some color grading. Would I use this camera again, however? Truth be told, it would be on rare occasions. I found myself wanting either my Fujifilm XE-5 or Panasonic GX9 during most of my walk, simply for the speed and ergonomics. But, if I can find an old point and shoot with an EVF, then I can see myself possibly pocketing one of these “digicams” more often than the big sensor powerhouses I typically love.
Enough typing. Here’s some photos:
