Highly Recommended (Canon Digital Ixus II)

Member Name: bokamanic

Product:	Canon Digital Ixus II
Date:	03/02/04 (543 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Size, Style, Photo Quality , Easy to use, Build Quality

Disadvantages: Flash in Automatic mode

This is a quality digital camera and gives me a good feeling every time I look at it. It?s small so easy to take anywhere in your pocket as you never now when you could have the opportunity for a great photo. The styling of the Ixus ll is stunning and is what sold it for me compared to other similar cameras. The slick lines with no bulky protrusions and the silver creates a great look.

The Ixus ll doesn?t just look good though, it performs just as well as it looks. The photos created are first class, with the Superfine setting and 2048 x 1536 pixels A4 size photos can be printed which are so shape there is no loss of detail. There are 3 settings for what is called the compression setting, Superfine, Fine and Normal, There is very little, almost unnoticeable difference between the qualities of these, however a 1.5mb superfine photo is compressed to 1mb with the fine and with the normal setting it?s 0.5mb approximately. Whatever settings used high quality photos are achieved.

Having taken your photo they?re displayed on the high quality 1.5 inch LCD screen, which in the play mode enables you to zoom up to 10 times to view detail which in my opinion is a great feature when showing people photos. As well as taking photos it takes movies up to 3mins on the lower sizes and 30 sec?s on the largest one. This wasn?t a feature I really looked at when buying a camera but having got it, I really rate it now and the quality of movies created on the Ixus ll is very high and it has longer capacity compared to other makes.

This camera is so easy to use, the menus are clear and it doesn?t take long to get used to what everything means. With the manual mode you can experiment with a wide range of setting, or if you just want to snap just switch to the automatic mode, where the settings are just size and quality/compression rate.

The zoom function speaks for itself with an optical zoom of x2 and digital zoom of x3.2, however I haven?t really used
the digital zoom as the quality of photos does reduce if used.

What I like about the Ixus ll and I think Canon in generally are renowned for is the high build quality of their products. The Ixus ll feels solidly put together with mechanisms such as the battery hatch and memory card slot are very positive, feels like it will last along time, if taken care of.

Having noted the good points about the Ixus ll, there are two small gripes I?ve had with mine. The firsts is the strength of the flash in the automatic mode, when just snapping, when the flash is required and it goes off it is very bright, too bright, and gives a lot of reflection in the photo and reduces the quality of the picture, not to mention that it blinds everyone for a few seconds. This can be overcome by using the manual mode and changing the settings. Either have no flash and increase the shuttle time, or reduce it and use the flash.

The second thing may not apply if you buy it, but when attaching it to my PC the connection between the camera and cable has a bit of play in it and sometimes to make a good connection a bit of wiggling has to been done.

Overall this is a great camera and I?m very pleased with it and the value for money you get. I could probably go on and on about it as it is so good, but the general message you should get from this review is that the Ixus ll is a great camera and well worth buying if looking for a 3.2 mega camera with a zoom.

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