Digital Camera: Canon IXUS 300 HSSilver 100 MP 38x Optical Zoom 30 Inch Wide Purecolor II G LCD

A very nice little camera that takes good photos and has the usual easy to use Canon UI and is well made. However, it's not all roses as I will explain.

The Good: Takes good photos, often great; P, S & A modes (no M); really decent high ISO performance - way better than previous small Canons and equal to the S90; exposure compensation only 1 button press - I like that; it's fast & responsive - incredible 3.7 fps in "normal" mode or lightening fast 8fps with reduced size images; great HD video; intuitive controls (haven't opened the manual and I have figure out all the features in about 10 minutes).

Not so good: Barrel distortion (although typical for a small camera like this); corner image softness; sometimes strange Auto ISO behaviour.; size - is it just TOO small? The controls are tiny and if you have big hands you could struggle with this. 6 stars for neatness, but is this at the expense of ergonomics? Probably yes. Also, it's needlessly rounded in shape. Which looks very nice but it means it won't stand up. This is of more than academic interest. First, you have to put it down either face down on the marble coffee table outside (and scratch the front) or rear down (and scratch the back) you choose. Also, you can't stand the camera on the table and run around to get yourself and the mrs in the photo - it will fall over.

Anpther thing to mention that is not immediately obvious: The camera is a bit confused about what shape of photos you are supposed to take. It is advertised as having a 3" screen, which indeed it has. But no-one tells you that it's actually a 3" widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio screen. Fair enough, you say - tellies and some picture frames are widescreen now, so why not cameras. Well that's fine expect for the fact that the sensor is not widescreen format, it's 4:3.

So what does this mean? Well it means if you choose shoot full 10M pixel resolution photos, those are in 4:3 format and you have black bars on either side of the screen. This means the visible picture size is not 3" - it's more like 2.4". I haven't had a digicam with a screen smaller than 3" for years and the picture on the IXUS 300 does seem small when shooting like this. Of course there is an alternative - shoot widescreen pictures; then the pictures fill the screen. But then you aren't using all the sensor pixels, only about 8M of them. So effectively you have an 8M pixel camera, which is not what you ordered.

And actually, it's worse. If you shoot widescreen - on your 8M pixel camera - what happens if you want to print the pictures on regular (say) A4 paper? Well the paper is not widescreen format. So then you have to crop the images even further to get them to fit. You end up with something like 6M effective useable pixels... which clearly is not that great.

So overall, this is a really lovely camera, and it does take great photos. But it is flawed. It's neither a widescreen shooter, nor a conventional 4:3 one. It's confused. Canon should have stuck with the 4:3 format found on it's earlier cameras if you ask me, and this would have been a much better product.

Products

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Current eBay Offers

Canon Li-Ion Battery NB-6L f/ IXUS 85IS (NEW)

£39.38
End Date: Saturday Sep-11-2010 2:27:40 BST
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Canon IXY 10S PowerShot SD3500 Digital IXUS 210 Black

£205.00
End Date: Saturday Sep-11-2010 6:50:58 BST
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CANON DIGITAL IXUS 95IS SILVER +LOWEPRO CASE + WARRANTY

£149.00
End Date: Saturday Sep-11-2010 9:06:05 BST
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