Canon Digital IXUS 70

Canon are very well know for there cameras and always produce very good products. This is no exception and comes with lots of features. It is a 7.1 megapixel digital camera which means the pictures that it takes are very, very good quality. Personally I think that 5 megapixels is enough for taking photos but if you are planning on doing a lot of editing and zooming in on certain parts of photos then maybe 6 or 7 megapixels is more what you are after. ...
...you are looking to take photos to edit and want a well know name for a camera then this could be a good option for you. It has a new technology for taking photos of people and can detect and face on the screen and set itself up so you will get the best possible picture, I will go into more detail for this later on. It also has a red eye reduction feature in play-back mode.

DESIGN

Starting with the look of the camera ... more

Canon are very well know for there cameras and always produce very good products. This is no exception and comes with lots of features. It is a 7.1 megapixel digital camera which means the pictures that it takes are very, very good quality. Personally I think that 5 megapixels is enough for taking photos but if you are planning on doing a lot of editing and zooming in on certain parts of photos then maybe 6 or 7 megapixels is more what you are after. This fits into the second category there so if you are looking to take photos to edit and want a well know name for a camera then this could be a good option for you. It has a new technology for taking photos of people and can detect and face on the screen and set itself up so you will get the best possible picture, I will go into more detail for this later on. It also has a red eye reduction feature in play-back mode.

DESIGN

Starting with the look of the camera it has a very simple design; it is really just a box shape. The whole cameras dimensions are 86 x 53 x 18 mm; this makes it a very compact camera which can fit into your pocket or your hand very easily. As far as I can make out it comes in two different designs either just silver (the one that I have) or with a black ring around the lens which reaches out onto the main body of the camera. The second of these is definitely not as good looking but I am not too sure if this is the same model or a different model altogether. One thing that pleased me when I bought this was that it had an optical view finder that a lot of cameras don't come with anymore and this is pretty useful when taking photos outside and it is too bright to use the screen. It is a fairly simple design, on the back the buttons are all offset to the right with the 64mm LCD (liquid crystal display) screen on the left side. This means that it was designed for right handed people so if you are a left handed person this might not be the best camera for you. I am not sure how many, if there are any, left handed cameras are around though. On the right hand side is a slider to change between the three modes (pictures, movies and play back). There are also the buttons for navigating on the screen, changing the flash setting, changing the picture settings and so on. It has a built in flash which is pretty powerful but thanks to the new technology built in the flash doesn't overpower the photo making everything way too bright.

FEATURES

This camera is packed full of features. It has all the basic ones that come with most cameras like red eye reduction on the flash which is pretty rubbish actually to the new fancy technology to set itself up for taking photos of people. It has 14 preset shooting programs that are Snow, Beach, Indoor, Foliage, Aquarium, Fireworks, Colour swap, Underwater, Kids & pets, Colour accent, Digital macro, Portrait mode, Stitch assist and Night snapshot. These all are very good for what they say they will do and they are not all just specialised for that single setting, they also work for other situations as well, I don't regularly take photos of snow for instance but this setting is good for photos with the dominating colour of white, like my bedroom wall.

It also has 11 special effects that are Sepia, Vivid, Neutral, Vivid Red, Vivid Blue, Vivid Green, Black & White, Custom Effect, Positive Film, Darker Skin Tone and Lighter Skin Tone. These are all pretty fun and I spend quite a lot of time playing about with them. My favourite is the vivid blue special effect, I use this special effect a lot for just taking photos of myself because it makes me seem blue and this is quite funky. I also use photo editing software quite a lot for playing about with photos which is always fun. A good piece of Photo Editing software is essential to anyone who takes a lot of pictures but one like Photoshop can set you back a good few hundred pounds but you do get a lot of features.

It has a 3x optical zoom so you can zoom into things. You can also take the photos off the camera and as they are such good quality you could just crop then and zoom in like that, you would loose some image quality but it is not noticeable.

One of the main, or the main, selling point for this is the Face Detect feature. This is the feature I mentioned earlier meaning that it sets itself up to take the best possible photo of a person. When taking a photo you just hold the shutter button half down and it will detect a person and set itself up. After this it will actually continue to track the person as they move so it doesn't mean you have to stand or sit still until the photo is taken. This feature is extremely useful for me because I take a lot of photos of myself when I am bored so it stops the flash from overpowering the photo and making me seem really, really pale. This feature along makes it worth the £170 or so that I spent on this camera.

Another one of the main features is the red eye reduction within the play back mode. This makes it possible to remove the red eye that has been caused by the flash. I have to admit though I would rather use a program on my computer to do this because I have more control over it then but this feature on the camera does work pretty well which adds on to the worth of this product. It can be annoying at times though when you don't get the right outcome but most of the time it does work pretty well.

Probably the biggest change from its predecessor is the new processor that is provided in it. This is the Digic III processor which is faster than the one in the older model of this camera. This processor enables longer battery life, faster start-up, faster shutter speeds and faster auto focus. This also gives it the extra power to be able to use the new features that come with this camera. I don't have the older version so I cannot compare it so all I can tell you is what I have read about it and that it works and I haven't had the camera stop working yet.

PERFORMANCE

This section is more what you would read if you read a review in a magazine but I thought I would add it in anyway because some of you might be interested in it. As I just mentioned this has a better processor than its predecessor which means it has faster shutter speeds than older models, I don't know how much faster it is but I can quote times that it takes to take pictures that I have found which researching this product on the internet.
From start-up to the first picture taken it takes just under 1 second which is pretty fast or a digital camera. For photos taken straight after this it takes about 1 ½ seconds.

IMAGES

The main reason for getting a digital camera is of course for taking photos. As I have already said this is a 7.1 Megapixel camera which means it takes very high quality pictures if it has all the right equipment like a good lens etc. This camera does have all of that so it takes very good pictures. All of the pictures taken are in Jpeg format so pretty much any program would be able to use them. The pictures that I have taken with it are all very good quality and the camera lives up to what I expected to get for my money. The images are all very accurate with the colours and are all in focus so all in all the images are very good.

MOVIES

This camera also does movie capture but it was not designed to do this as it was designed to be a good camera for taking pictures. I have used it on occasions to see how good the video capture is and it is pretty good for a digital camera. It also has a microphone so it will capture audio as well.

CONCLUSION

This camera is very good and packed full of features. It has very good image quality and has new technology making it a bit ahead of its competitors. I love this camera and it was well worth buying it for me. I hope I have answered any questions you may have had about this camera and I hope this has helped you make a decision if you may be interested in this camera or not. If you have any questions about it feel free to ask me as well. Thanks for reading.  

...less