Canon IXUS 200 IS
Monday, 26 April 2010
A cute new compact packing a rather incredible 12.1megapixels, the thing looks almost dwarfed by its widescreen LCD back. It’s a touchscreen, too.
Adding to the cute factor is the colour range – you can get this in Plain Jane brushed aluminium, or purpley-pink, gold or pale blue, depending on your taste/inclination/usual photography outfit colours ...
At fully three-inches diagonally, the rear LCD is particularly lavish. It has a really wide 24mm lens with 5x zoom, Optical Image Stabiliser and Touch Auto Focus – like the iPhone, just touch on what you want it to focus on and expose for.
The IXUS 200 IS even has High Definition movie recording, all on a camera small enough to almost bury completely in a large paw.
I must say, it’s pretty impressive, getting all this into such a slick little package. On the top is a little, slightly fiddly on-off button and a triangular slider over on top left that toggles between Auto, Manual(-ish) and Video modes. The top-right shutter button is the usual ‘hold down to focus, all the way to capture’ button, and there’s a little toggle in front that handles the zoom.
On the back is the typical jog-dial to the right of that most impressive screen, which lets you quickly choose macro, flash modes (Auto and Off, in fully aoto mode, and between Auto, Flash On (regardless), Slow Shutter Sync for shooting at night events like fireworks and venues, and flash off.
There’s also a Menu button, and a button inside the jog-dial for unction. The Play button is separate and placed under top-right of the camera.
I was a little wary of the touchscreen, but in use it’s fairly easy if you use the thumb of your left hand to do the touching. If you focus on a subject with a touch of the screen, they will be the focus of the shot even if they move, in good lights, anyway. This is a little hard to test as the lens is so wide-angle, it has a rather incredible depth of field – in other words, pretty much everything is in focus outside anyway, as you can see below.
Depth of field is very wide at full wide angle anyway – everything is in focus.
But touch-focus certainly works, as does touch-exposure.
The Auto mode is pretty clever – it deploys scene detection, face detection, motion detection and noise reduction.
Movies are shot in High Definition – 1280x720 pixels.
So, what are the images like?
Like most Canons I’ve tried in the last few years, I did not bother loading the software that came with it. I always consider this is for PC users and I’m not quite sure why Canon even puts Mac versions in the box, except if you need to make panoramas (which I do in Photoshop). And just plugging it into my Mac with the supplied USB cable and turning it on boots iPhoto, or Image Capture or Aperture, depending which Apple software you prefer, and voila, the images are on my Mac.
Pictures are gorgeous, with the DiG!C 4 processor quickly assessing the image data and creating rich results. The processor also demonstrates that awesome and longstanding Canon trick of capturing way more detail in the shadows than you realise, until you start playing with levels as this rather crude example of the cat shows, before (above) and after (below).
It would be easy to expect not detail at all in this backlit cat’s fur, but that’s far from the case.
Even in movie mode, switching the camera from a bright sky to dark bush led to an exposure change of under a second in my tests – good enough for amateur filmmaking, except that the capturing 1280x720 pixels really puts this into a new league, easily rivalling good consumer video cameras. The format is the widely supported newer H.264, which works in iMovie as well as Final Cut, and you can choose PAL (as in NZ and Europe) or NTSC (for the US) formats, which is important to know when you’re burning DVDs for worldwide dissemination.
Conclusion: Amazing that Canon can pack all this into such a competent camera, and I like the strong body and the auto metal lens cover. Image quality is superb for such a little camera, and the lens is impressive. If you get one, for goodness sake put the wrist strap on – you'd hate to lose or drop it! On the downside, the controls are little and fiddly, and I worry that the port-covers for the HDMI (optional extra) and USB (supplied) cables will eventually break and fall off.
What's great: excellent image quality, really amazing movies from such a small device, handy big rear LCD, fast reaction times,
What's not: Fiddly little buttons. Screen gets smeared from all that touching.
Needs: small but strong fingers
Canon IXUS 200 IS, RRP$640
System Effective Number of Pixels 12.1 million, lens focal length (optical) 4.3mm to 21.5mm (35mm film equivalent 24-120), f/2.8 – 8.0 to f/5.9 – 8.0, shutter speeds 15 - 1/3000 second, optical zoom approx 5x, Image Stabilizer Optical Lens Shift Type in approx 3 steps. The focusing frame is Touch AF, Face Detect AiAF 1,2, and Single point; normal focusing range is 50cm to infinity at widest, 90cm to infinity fully zoomed-in, with macro on it’s 5-50cm.
Selectable Shooting Modes include Intelligent Auto (with Scene Detection), P, Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Sunset, Creative Light Effect, Fireworks, Long Shutter, Beach, Aquarium, Foliage, Snow, ISO 3200, Digital Macro, Colour Accent, Colour Swap, Stitch Assist, Movie (Standard, Colour Accent, Colour Swap).; requires Mac: OS X v10.4- v10.5 (for the Canon software – works fine with Snow Leopard, no Canon software installed).
Memory Storage SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card, MultiMediaCard, MMCplus card, HC MMCplus card,
Full specs are at: www.canon.co.nz/en-NZ/For-You/Digital-Cameras/IXUS-Digital-Cameras/200IS-Camera
