I have been looking to upgrade from my old digital camera for a few months now, and having read a lot of reviews, I decided that the Canon IXUS 400 was a good product that suited my needs, the only problem was that if I was going to invest in a new digital camera, I felt that I should go for 5MP. This is when I noticed that Canon had brought out the IXUS 500 the big brother of the 400. The book price for this little gem was around £400, but a search around the web found it available for £298 (pixmania). I decided that before I made my purchase, I would go and have a look at one "in the flesh" so I trotted down to my local Jessops to find one.
The first impression of the camera
were very good. It is small and stylish, and has a nice weight to it, which makes it feel nice and solid. The buttons are small, but well laid out. You do not feel in danger of pressing the wrong one by accident.
I was impressed, so I asked what there best price was, and they price matched at £316 (apparently they cannot price match to pixmania as they are based in france).
The camera does not come with a case as standard, which I must admit I think is quite shoddy for a camera that retails at £400. Anyway there are a huge variety of cases aroung, for about £10-15 and I found one with a spot for an extra memory card.
It comes with a 32mb compact flash memory card, which is not bad as standard, but I wanted to get a 128mb one as well.
I also decided to get an extra battery. The camera comes with a Lithium battery as standard (this was one of my requirements for the camera, no having to dischard it fully before recharging), but I decided to get a spare anyway. Its about £40 for a genuine canon spare but I got a compatible one for £18. So all in all I got the whole lot for £350, and no waiting for delivery!
Once I got home I started to play with the camera in earnest. The included battery had a small amount of charge in it, so I set the other one to charge while I started to play.
The camera was extremely easy to pick up and go, just turn it on, and click away. The zoom is a wheel around the shutter button, push anticlockwise to zoom in, clockwise to zoom out. The shutter has 2 levels, hold it on the first one to allow the autofocusing to work, and then push down a bit further to take the picture.
Reviewing the pictures on the back of the camera is also easy. When you have taken a picture it will display it for a few seconds, before going back to live mode (the amount of time it is displayed for is configurable from the menu). To review all the pictures on the camera, you have a 2 position slide button. When it is to the right you are in recording mode, and to the left it is in play mode. When you are in play mode, you can use 2 of the buttons next to the display to move throught the pictures, and a quick click of the func key followed by the set key deletes the image.
The camera is set to take pictures in the large mode by default (2592 x 1944) but has 3 other sizes available, 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 640 x 480, so plenty of choice, and images are stored in jpeg format. In large mode the 32mb card will take around 12 images, but as this is much bigger than A4 size im not sure you'd need to use this size very often.
I must admit that by this stage I had not looked at the manual in any great detail, but there are clearly lots of options that you can change in the menus, including showing histogram information for your images to tell you whether the image is too bright or too dark.
The battery I had left charging, was done in 2 hours so I could continue to play, while I charged the other one.
I installed the software and downloaded my pictures easily, using the supplied USB cable to connect to my computer. One feature I liked about the software was the ability to get it to create directories for your pictures with the date they were taken, making it very easy to sort your pictures. Although if this does not appeal to you, you do not have to do it this way :-) I was very impressed by the quality of the pictures, they were bright and vibrant. 5mp seems to give you a huge amount of detail. The pictures were very clear, with even the smallest of details being very well defined.
I have yet to delve in depth into all the options on this camera, but it certainly seems to be very configurable, and the menu system is easy to navigate through.
I would highly recommend this product without hesitation.
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Advantages: Camera has a small footprint, is packed with features and has a quality feel about it Disadvantages: You probably need to increase the memory card and buy a case for it
JohnnyFive 09.03.2005 (09.03.2005)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Canon Digital IXUS 500
Advantages: Camera has a small footprint, is packed with features and has a quality feel about it Disadvantages: You probably need to increase the memory card and buy a case for it
JohnnyFive 09.03.2005 (09.03.2005)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Canon Digital IXUS 500
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