This is one of the better quality digital cameras on the market. I bought it just before Christmas 2003 for £325 (John Lewis) but the price has since come down by about £25 or more and dropping.
First impressions on handling are that it feels neat and compact; the weight of it gives you a sense of confidence. Controls are obvious, iconised and clearly visible. The LCD screen is clear and bright. You can use it to focus and shoot or use the eye-viewer, whichever is most comfortable.
The quality of photos is consistently good even when on manual settings. You will need to become familiar with manual mode especially for back-lit subjects where fill-in flash is also essential. You'll end up with a lot of dark faces otherwise where the light is behind the subject.
The 7.4-22.2 mm zoom lens is surprising for far away subjects and focusing is by a simple rotating thumb control. It has a great wide-angle for closer subjects. It has a macro setting for really close subjects, down to 2 inches. Good for subjects like insects or flowers or those small objects you're putting on eBay.
The IXUS 400 is very forgiving and intelligent enough to compensate for most light and speed situations. This comes into its own for manual settings where there is good tolerance of these variable settings.
As you would expect it has the usual self-timer, flash and red-eye reduction mode, which work as well as any I've encountered. It also has 'stitch-assist' mode, useful for overlapping panoramic views of repeated shots where the wide angle can't cope. The continuous shooting mode is great fun if you want to experiment with action shots. Track and field athletics and set-pieces on goal in football are good subjects for this.
The IXUS 400 even tries to do an impersonation of a camcorder. You'll get up to 3 minutes of movie action, with sound too, which you can send as a file attachment by email. My son who lives away loved the ones of our pets ! But this does use up the memory so upload them to the computer if you want to keep them. You can of course replay the clip before this stage, as you can the stills, until you get what you want. This is the beauty and economy of digital if this is your first. No more wasted paper photos because you can delete what you don't want or better still review it immediately after taking it.
It comes with a 32 MB flash card which is big enough for most short term situations. These memory cards, if you've never come across them before, store the image in digital form. Each can be erased and over-written if you want so each card is the only roll of film you'll ever need ! You'll probably upload images frequently to your computer anyway to make space on the card. But I did get a second 128MB card to supplement the storage. I got it free as a special offer from Canon within a limited time of purchase. It will come in handy on holiday when I'm away for a 2 week stretch.
This extra memory is handy for doing movie clips too. Together with an internal 4.0 M pixels, which determines the optical resolution, memory is no problem with this camera for the average user. You can always carry a spare memory card with you if you think you'll run out.
The economically sized battery seems to last forever although a draw-back is the separate but neat mains charger. The IXUS 400 comes with easy to use software for your computer and all the connections you need. My SLR never gets a look in these days.
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Advantages: Zoom range, photo quality, extra features, compatibilty with Mac Disadvantages: Can't change zoom during movie mode, camera case sold separately
Advantages: Top-notch build quality and design. First rate results Disadvantages: No case! Quite pricey for specification level. Shortish battery life with no clear indicator
BNibbles 22.08.2003 (24.08.2003)
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Review of Canon Digital IXUS 400
Jul 12th, 2004
(Jul 14th, 2004)
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