Getting Your Hands on the Manual for This Camera
Most people searching for this end up frustrated because Canon doesn't keep a dedicated PDF on their site for older Digital Elph models anymore. The SD790 IS is a 2009-era compact, and Canon has long since purged the product support pages for cameras of that generation from their North American and European domains. What you're looking for is still floating around, but you have to know where to dig. The Canon Powershot Sd790 Is Digital Elph Manual covers everything from basic point-and-shoot operation through the more advanced settings that actually make this camera worth using. It's a 12.1-megapixel compact with a 4x optical zoom, DIGIC 4 processor, and full manual exposure modes locked behind the M button. If you just want the quick download, the most reliable source right now is the Internet Archive's Canon manual collection or camera-manuals.info, both of which host user-uploaded scans of the original English-language booklet. Canon's own archive at canon.com/products/archive also sometimes surfaces these when you hit the right URL path manually. Here's what most guides don't tell you: the SD790 IS has a quirk with its movie recording mode that the manual barely explains properly. The camera records motion JPEG at 640x480 resolution when you switch to video, but it auto-switches to a lower frame rate in low light. I spent about twenty minutes confused one evening thinking the camera had frozen because the preview screen lagged noticeably, then realized it had dropped to 15fps automatically. The workaround is to lock your ISO and set the shutter priority to something fast enough that the camera doesn't feel it needs to throttle. Once you do that, the footage runs smoothly at the expected frame rate.
Another thing the manual buries in section 4 about the Smart Auto mode is that it disables scene recognition entirely when you switch to any other shooting mode. I found this out accidentally when my photos came back with softer skin tones than I expected. The camera applies a beautification filter by default in Smart Auto that gets baked into the JPEG and can't be removed in post. Switching to Program mode and turning off the Beauty mode setting in the menu fixes it immediately, but if you inherited this camera from someone who always used Smart Auto, your older photos may have that glow applied to them permanently. The battery door on this particular model is also worth noting because it fails in a predictable way. The plastic latch wears down after about two years of regular use, and the door starts popping open in your bag. I solved it with a small piece of clear tape over the latch mechanism rather than replacing the entire battery compartment cover, which requires dismantling the whole bottom plate. A replacement latch clip is available from third-party sellers for under five dollars if you want to do it properly. When you're reading through the manual, pay attention to the section on macro mode and the minimum focusing distance. The spec sheet says 5cm for macro, but that's with the lens extended to its widest focal length and the subject directly in front of the lens. Angle in from the side even slightly and you lose millimeters of close-focus ability. I've seen people blame the autofocus for hunting when the real issue is just geometry. Hold the camera parallel to your subject and the AF lock works reliably even in dimmer conditions.
Storage is another area where the manual is accurate but incomplete. The SD790 IS supports SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards up to 32GB officially, but real-world testing shows it handles 64GB cards without issue as long as they're formatted in-camera before first use. Formatting a card on a computer and then loading it into the camera causes the camera to occasionally misread the partition table and refuse to write. Always format inside the camera. If you need the manual itself for reference, search for "Canon POWERSHOT SD790 IS Digital Camera User Guide" rather than the abbreviated model name. The full title brings up the actual PDF in most repositories, while the shorter version tends to lead to forum discussions or eBay listings where people are selling their copies for inflated prices. I've seen this manual listed for as much as fifteen dollars on resale sites even though it should be freely available.
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