Canon Ixus 1000 HS Review

It’s 10 years since the first Digital Ixus camera, and Canon has marked the occasion with the launch of the 1000 HS. The number 10 is a running theme, defining the megapixel rating and the zoom range. Even the video mode records at 1080p (pronounced ten-eighty-p, in case you’re wondering).

We’ve got little time for marketing gimmicks, but in this case, the 10 theme makes a lot of practical sense. 10 megapixels strikes a sensible balance between detail and noise levels, and the back-illuminated sensor design (where the electronic circuits don’t get in the way of the light path) bodes particularly well for noise. Meanwhile, the 10x zoom lens nudges this camera into ultra-zoom territory – perfect for sightseeing, sports and nature photography, as well as capturing candid portraits. It’s not the brightest of lenses, with an f/3.5-5.6 aperture, but that’s par for the course for this type of camera. More disappointingly, the lens is lacking when it comes to wide-angle photography, starting at 36mm. Rival cameras manage anything from 30mm to 24mm, capturing a much wider field of view.

The design is up to the usual high standards of the Ixus brand. There’s a choice of silver, brown or pink finishes, and the plastic body looks and feels remarkably like metal. It’s also astonishingly petite for a 10x zoom camera, and will slip into a small pocket. There’s a well-proportioned 3in screen but its widescreen shape means 4:3-shaped photos appear quite small, and its 230,000-pixel resolution is nothing to get excited about either. Battery life is the biggest let down, surviving for just 150 shots. Additional batteries cost an extortionate £40. The HDMI output is welcome, though, providing 1080i playback on an HD TV.

The four-way pad doubles as a wheel for quickly adjusting settings, although there aren’t very many to adjust. Photographic options are limited, with no manual exposure or focus and a basic selection of other controls. There are some fun scene modes, though. Smart Shutter captures a photo when the camera detects a smile, a wink or a new person entering the scene. It’s unreliable and silly, but lots of fun. Handheld Night Scene mode is more useful, capturing four exposures in quick succession and aligning and combining them to reduce noise. It only works for static subjects but in the right situations it’s highly effective.

Squeezing a 10x zoom lens into a camera this slim is no mean feat but Canon has done so without too much compromise. Photos lacked the biting detail that some cameras manage, but we’d only envisage that being an issue when heavily cropping the results. Chromatic aberrations were visible towards the edges of photos, though, resulting in a slight loss of detail and halos around high-contrast lines (see below). Automatic exposures were nearly always on the mark, both in terms of image brightness and picking the best balance of shutter and ISO speeds. Skin tones sometimes came out a little warm but the effect was fairly flattering.

As usual, the main limitation of the 1000 HS’s photos was noise. There was some evidence of it in brightly lit shots at the base ISO 125. As the ISO speed increased, digital processing blurred details and reduced the contrast in an effort to hide the rising noise. However, this camera still produced photos worth printing at ISO speeds up to 1600, which we can’t say about any other compact-shaped ultra-zoom camera. With most other issues being largely equal, the 1000 HS’s low noise puts it ahead of its competitors for image quality.

Another strength of this CMOS sensor is fast performance. According to Canon, continuous shooting is at “up to 3.7fps”, and sure enough, the camera hit that speed when shooting in very bright conditions with a 1/1,000s shutter speed. A 1/125s shutter slowed it down to 2.6fps, but that’s still a great result, and good news for action or wildlife photography. The camera was relatively pedestrian in normal use, though, taking four seconds to switch on and shoot, and 2.6 seconds between shots.

The fast sensor also captures slow motion video, recording at 240fps for 1/8th-speed playback at 30fps. It’s great fun, but the 320x240-pixel resolution means these clips aren’t as impressive as the VGA slow-motion clips from various Casio cameras and the Fujifilm HS10.

Normal-speed video capture was a different story, with the 1920x1080 resolution capturing stacks of detail. Autofocus and zoom were active during recording, and their motors were inaudible on the high-quality stereo soundtrack. Low-light videos were noisy, though, particularly in the shadows. The 1080p video files are massive, with 34Mbit/s AVC video and uncompressed audio consuming around 250MB per minute. The upside is that this is one the best video modes we’ve seen from a pocket-sized camera, matched only by the 4x zoom Sony TX7  The TX7’s videos are cleaner but its wide-angle clips suffer badly from barrel distortion.

There are a few reasons why we’re in two minds about recommending the Ixus 1000 HS. The poor battery life is the worst offender, but the lack of manual controls or a proper wide-angle lens and the low-resolution screen also count against it. The excellent Samsung WB650 rights all these wrongs and now costs just £190. However, the Ixus 1000 HS comes out on top in the areas that really matter. Its image quality in low light is excellent, an area where all of its rivals struggle. Its 1080p video mode is a cut above the others’ 720p modes. Its continuous mode is seriously fast, and elsewhere, it’s fast enough. It’s also incredibly slim for a 10x zoom camera. The bottom line is that this is the best pocket-sized ultra-zoom camera currently available.

Source article: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/digital-cameras