Sleek and Stylish (Canon Digital Ixus V)

Member Name: pastyorf

Product:	Canon Digital Ixus V
Date:	07/08/02 (489 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Point and Shoot, Excellent LCD, Takes a good picture even in the poorest of light conditions

Disadvantages: Doesn't remember all user preferences, The flash is blinding, Movie lengths are severely limited

It's not often that I buy anything for more than £100 but I saved up for over 4 months including Christmas and decided to buy a digital camera. The markets huge and unless you have specific ideas of what you are looking for it's hard to find the best camera. I had £400 max and wanted a camera that used compact flash (because they are high volume cheep cards), took over 2 million pixels and also looked stylish.

Voila.

The Ixus V was one of the only cameras that fitted all my picky needs.

I bought the camera on a Sunday and it arrived by Wednesday. First thin was to charge up the battery, which took a little over 2 hours. Then once placed into the camera I waited over night to charge the internal battery of the camera and the spare battery, which I purchased.

I took the camera the next day to school and started to take some pictures and basically show off to my friends. When I got home I attempted the installation of the software, which proved trickier than possibly it should have been but once all on I uploaded the pics.

I'm a sceptic of cameras and only believed that SLR's have true quality. The Ixus V proved that incorrect. The pictures were amazingly sharp. Since I had the setting on 1600 x 1200 and superfine compression the pictures were larger than the monitor could view. When printed off though the true quality shone through. The camera picks up every little detail even to the grain in wood over 4 meters away.

I have since been on holiday and left my SLR at home. I wasn't disappointed. Scenery with so much detail that I thought the camera might loose clarity but the crispness came through.

The Ixus V is a thoroughly impressive camera. However there are a few glitches! :

1 - The longest movie is only 30 seconds (normally only 22 seconds long and can hit as low as 6 seconds on large format).

2 - The batteries are not cheep (my additional battery wa
s £30) and although rechargeable I tend to go through 2 when using the camera a lot.

3 - Canon only supply an 8Mb card? What use to anyone is 8Mb?? That proved to be a necessary upgrade (once the funds permitted) to 256Mb but also costing £81 (not cheep).

4 - The camera does not like sand! So be extremely careful if on holiday. A recent article in a magazine from a user said that for 1 grain of sand that got into the camera it will cost more than the camera to repair.

5 - What is with the flash? It's a killer! You can easily use it as a torch (I have).

However even through all those points I would still buy the camera and have recommended it to many of my friends.

Summary: