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Review: I bought this Canon Ixus 40 digital camera just before going away on holiday. Delivery times were tight (ordered on Thursday night, going away on Tuesday), but I shopped around anyway and ended up ordering the camera from Amazon and other parts elsewhere (the 1GB memory card sold by Amazon didn't have great reviews). Everything arrived in the nick of time (inc. spare battery and 12V battery charger, which both turned out to be absolutely essential). Amazon did a free case bundled with the camera, which turned out to be nicely sufficient. This is my first digital camera, and I've had a ball! (at the expense of those that I was constantly pointing the camera at...) The main thing I'd been worried about was the slow response time I'd found in other digitial camera, but this camera is nice and quick (although not as quick as the old mechanicals). On our four week holiday, I ended up taking about 1200 photos, meaning that I had to dump some to the laptop a couple of times, despite the 1GB card. I was using the camera all the time (with display on), and the battery tended to last 2 to 3 days, hence the essential spare (I got a Uniross replacement, which doesn't seem to last so long, but since one's charging while the other's in use, there's not that much problem). The single thing I most enjoyed was being able to take stunning macro shots of flowers, insects, etc. To have this capability without the bulk of an SLR is just fantastic. A down-side, however, is that I was sometimes unable to focus on a desired macro object, and macro focusing with the telephoto in use didn't seem to work at all. Manual focus would help here, but it would add to the complexity of the design, which is currently nice and simple. A real benefit of the good display was that I could take photos of other people's climbing guidebooks, local maps, etc and use them just by zooming in on the text or diagrams on the display. As we were in little-frequented areas, with unavailable or out-of-print guidebooks, this was totally invaluable. The camera was not only a tool for recording where we had been, but also a resource that could show us where to go, and small and convenient enough to use even half way up a rock face! Altogether, I'd highly recommend it. |
Digital Cameras
