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It's now possible to pick up a decent 3.2-megapixel camera for less than £150 so on first impressions the Ixus 30 seems fairly pricey. Take a closer look, though, and you'll find a huge array of features packed into this compact camera (which is no bigger than a pack of playing cards) to justify the price tag.
There's a 3x optical zoom and the 2in screen at the back of the camera is bright and responds well to movement. To the right of this is a switch that allows you to change between image review, shooting and movie capture modes. At the lowest image quality setting you can record around three minutes of movie footage at a time.
The shooting settings you'll want to access most frequently, including flash, macro and landscape modes have their own dedicated buttons on the back of the camera, and the Menu button gives fast access to camera settings.
The Function/Set button in the middle of the circular cursor button calls up the full image settings menu, where you can change resolution and quality and choose from a range of automated scene modes. These are optimised for snapping different types of images but experienced photographers will prefer the more advanced manual settings in this menu and experiment with the light-metering feature.
Image quality was superb. Colours were faithfully reproduced and outlines were crisp. The camera can be connected directly to any PictBridge-compliant printer or there's a USB cable to transfer images to a PC. A 16Mb SD memory card and a rechargeable battery are supplied.
You will go a long way to find a cheaper camera that outperforms this Canon, which is available exclusively from Jessops.
Contact:
Canon 0870 514 3723
www.canon.co.uk
www.jessops.com
Also consider:
Fujifilm FinePix F810
See also:
A moderately priced four-megapixel digital camera that's perfect for beginners 05 Nov 2004
All Digital Cameras
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