Is this normal: Canon ELPH PowerShot SD 870 IS

[NaMo4184]

So I went ahead and bought my self an 870 for my birthday. After reading several stellar reviews, I had high expectations.

For the most part it has performed fine. Besides the automatic settings decideing to bast every photo with flash, leaving my highlights washed out like a river bank it would be nice for it to only turn on when specifically needed.

Any way. the problem is that I'm having amazingly bad barrel distortion. I knew it was a wide angle lends fit into a very small camera but I just didn't expect the this distortion to be this bad. I'm a nascent photographer. My education comes from reading blogs scattered across the internet (really like http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/).

So what I'm trying to say that this might be me. So I wanted to ask some more knowledge people.

Please have a look and tell me what you think. My solution is if this is out of the ordinary bad. I'm just going to try to call up amazon or canon have them trade me out a new camera or some how get an 850

 

[PlaceofDis]

1. i have a SD600, and i can turn off the autoflash if i want to, you should be able to as well.

2. no pictures to say if its messed up or not, sounded like you were going to link/attach some

 

[NaMo4184]

1. i have a SD600, and i can turn off the autoflash if i want to, you should be able to as well.

2. no pictures to say if its messed up or not, sounded like you were going to link/attach some

Wow appreciate the fast reply. I was editing the post to put the pic in as you typed out your response.

Looking at these reviews

870

850

dpReview says that there should be a 1.4% distortion on the 870 and 1.2% on the 850.

 

[nutmac]

Remove images from a website that requires username and password.

As for the barrel distortion, yes, such distortion is very common for wide angle lens. Most decent image editing applications (e.g., Photoshop Elements) can correct barrel distortion quite easily.