katana
7th of May 2005 (Sat), 13:04
I've had the Ixus 700 for month and shot about 1500 images with it, so time for a quick review.
Physicals:
It's smaller, lighter and curvier than previous models. I was worried that this may pose problems handling the camera but I have had no such problems. The only slight issue is that it's now harder to set the camera on a wall or table to take a long exposure due to the slightly curved bottom. A mini tripod solves this quite easily :)
The back of the camera packs a plethora of buttons into a very small space, but they are actually easy to use and don't get in the way of shooting too much.
Brushed aluminium has replaced the stainless steel finish of earlier cameras in the range. It's a nice finish, perhaps not as hard wearing, but in a month the camera has been to the beach, up mountains and in the sea and only has a few scratches to show for it.
Because of the curvier design the camera certainly is more pocketable that the earlier square Ixus.
Operation:
The best thing about this camera (and there's a lot of good) is that it fires up in about a half second. Gone is the painful wait for startup and the equally annoying requirement to keep the button pressed down of earlier models. One tap on the power button and you're ready to go.
The 2.5 inch LCD screen is very nice to have, and is very bright even set to the lowest brightness. In fact going back to an earlier camera I wonder how I did without it.
All the camera's functions are easily accesible through a well thought out series of menus or directly through button presses. One thing that I would really really love to have though is an simple dedicated up/down arrow to control exposure compensation and ISO - one each just like on many SLRs. Going into a menu is too cumbersone for something I do a lot.
Photography:
In manual mode, at ISO 50 with auto white balance this camera takes great pictures.
Evaluative, center weighted and spot metering all do what they should. Spot metering is particularly nice to have. Most images seemed to be on the slightly underexposed side, so adding a third of a stop seemed to work well.
Image quality at ISO 50 is nice, without much noise. Noise does increase very rapidly with ISO setting. ISO 400 is really pretty noisy. Colour balance seems fairly neutral across a broad range of subjects, with most images pleasantly saturated rather than too heavy.
Auto focus is not so hot. In many situations that the old Ixus handled without problems the 700 struggled. Anything through glass seems a problem, as are moderately complex scenes such as a person against a forest back drop. The camera does a least show you the focal points so you shouldn't get caught out.
The 7.1 Megapixels make for some large images, which viewed pixel for pixel show the lens to wanting in some respects. There is a quite a degree of aberration around light to dark boundaries at the edge of the image. There is a conseqent loss of detail towards the outer portion of each picture. It's not serious, but perhaps 7.1 megapixels called for a slightly better lens.
Electronics:
With the LCD on, and flash used for about half the time I was able to shoot continuously for an hour or so on one battery. Without the flash this rises to about two hours, which with such a big LCD is pretty impressive.
Digic II allows lots of nice things, continuous shooting is a realistic option now, as are movies at 30fps until the card's full. In fact everything about this camera is quick, right down to the power on/off mentioned before.
The sd card included is a 32meg, so not a lot of use. On a 1GB card you can get about 300 superfine images at 7 megapixels. The SD card worked fine in my USB card reader with transfers at 6mb/s under Linux, making even uploading a full card fairly painless.
Conclusion:
Nice camera, nice operation, great pictures. Would have payed more for a better lens to get excellent pictures. My favourite camera yet by a long way.
Physicals:
It's smaller, lighter and curvier than previous models. I was worried that this may pose problems handling the camera but I have had no such problems. The only slight issue is that it's now harder to set the camera on a wall or table to take a long exposure due to the slightly curved bottom. A mini tripod solves this quite easily :)
The back of the camera packs a plethora of buttons into a very small space, but they are actually easy to use and don't get in the way of shooting too much.
Brushed aluminium has replaced the stainless steel finish of earlier cameras in the range. It's a nice finish, perhaps not as hard wearing, but in a month the camera has been to the beach, up mountains and in the sea and only has a few scratches to show for it.
Because of the curvier design the camera certainly is more pocketable that the earlier square Ixus.
Operation:
The best thing about this camera (and there's a lot of good) is that it fires up in about a half second. Gone is the painful wait for startup and the equally annoying requirement to keep the button pressed down of earlier models. One tap on the power button and you're ready to go.
The 2.5 inch LCD screen is very nice to have, and is very bright even set to the lowest brightness. In fact going back to an earlier camera I wonder how I did without it.
All the camera's functions are easily accesible through a well thought out series of menus or directly through button presses. One thing that I would really really love to have though is an simple dedicated up/down arrow to control exposure compensation and ISO - one each just like on many SLRs. Going into a menu is too cumbersone for something I do a lot.
Photography:
In manual mode, at ISO 50 with auto white balance this camera takes great pictures.
Evaluative, center weighted and spot metering all do what they should. Spot metering is particularly nice to have. Most images seemed to be on the slightly underexposed side, so adding a third of a stop seemed to work well.
Image quality at ISO 50 is nice, without much noise. Noise does increase very rapidly with ISO setting. ISO 400 is really pretty noisy. Colour balance seems fairly neutral across a broad range of subjects, with most images pleasantly saturated rather than too heavy.
Auto focus is not so hot. In many situations that the old Ixus handled without problems the 700 struggled. Anything through glass seems a problem, as are moderately complex scenes such as a person against a forest back drop. The camera does a least show you the focal points so you shouldn't get caught out.
The 7.1 Megapixels make for some large images, which viewed pixel for pixel show the lens to wanting in some respects. There is a quite a degree of aberration around light to dark boundaries at the edge of the image. There is a conseqent loss of detail towards the outer portion of each picture. It's not serious, but perhaps 7.1 megapixels called for a slightly better lens.
Electronics:
With the LCD on, and flash used for about half the time I was able to shoot continuously for an hour or so on one battery. Without the flash this rises to about two hours, which with such a big LCD is pretty impressive.
Digic II allows lots of nice things, continuous shooting is a realistic option now, as are movies at 30fps until the card's full. In fact everything about this camera is quick, right down to the power on/off mentioned before.
The sd card included is a 32meg, so not a lot of use. On a 1GB card you can get about 300 superfine images at 7 megapixels. The SD card worked fine in my USB card reader with transfers at 6mb/s under Linux, making even uploading a full card fairly painless.
Conclusion:
Nice camera, nice operation, great pictures. Would have payed more for a better lens to get excellent pictures. My favourite camera yet by a long way.