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75 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Digital Camera......., 26 Aug 2004
I have used a Canon EOS SLR outfit for over 10 years, and was reluctant to buy digital. After reading many, many, online reviews, I finally decided to buy this one. From the minute I opened the box I was not disappointed. The camera comes with a great big 128mb of memory card, and a free remote control, far better than the old cable release. The camera feels very rugged in the hand, even though it is about a third of the size and mass of my old EOS. Features are plentiful, including full manual mode and even manual focus, brilliant.
The menu system takes a little while to learn, but with customisable short-cut menus available, commonly used features can be only two clicks away. The 'My mode' lets you set up a whole load of options (including zoom setting) and save them as one of 4 custom modes, which can then be accessed directly from the mode dial. The camera has very few buttons compared to other models I was looking at, and all of the menu controls are accessed from just the 4-way pad and the OK button.
As far as the picture quality goes, I really can't fault it. The images are sharp, well exposed, with good colour rendition and generally as good as those from my SLR. (Within the 4MP enlargement range 8x10 inch prints). The 10x optical zoom is a lovely bit of kit, I can't believe how easy it is to handle, due to its lightness, hand held shots at full zoom (380mm 35mm equivalent) at a shutter speed of 1/100s still came out pin sharp, impossible with the SLR !Pictures taken with the flash, both indoors and out are all spot on 95% of the time, but with 2 stops of flash compensation available, any overexposure can be dialled out. The flashes red eye function seems to work fairly well too, but if portraits are your thing, you can use an external flash fitted on the hot shoe. There are also a few useful picture controls built in, such as contrast, saturation and sharpness, but I haven't needed to use these yet.
I will admit, in strongly backlit situations, there is some colour fringing toward the edges of the picture (chromatic aberrations, having said that, I have suffered this effect with SLR lenses costing more than this camera, in some tricky lighting situations. This is digital, and it has a lot of differences to film in the way it behaves, which have to be learnt, the beauty is, it's free film, if it comes out bad take another. With the cameras built in viewing mode, you can zoom in up to four times on any picture and study it more closely for composition, exposure etc, or view up to 16 thumbnail images for easy navigation through your gallery. I have only used this camera on HQ (High Quality) mode, which is sharp enough for everything so it seems, and it will hold 130 pictures on the included card. This figure goes down to 46 at SHQ (Super High Quality). So a bigger card might be in order if you are travelling.
I really can't say anything bad about this camera; it's small, light and a really great performer and it looks so good in black. Oh yes, it takes great movies too (8 minutes of PAL MPEG4 with sound on the included card).
I will say one thing to any potential buyers, buy at least one extra battery preferably two, they seem to drain very quickly, but that could be because I can't put the camera down.
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