Canon Digital Camera IXUS V3
(Powershot 230)
Personal Opinion
Personal opinion
Pro:
- The size and weight of the camera are ideal for slipping into a pocket
- The speed of turning on and firing is not instant but in most situtations
it has not presented any problem at all.
- A good combination of automatic and manual options.
- The movie mode can do 640 × 480.
- The battery is small, and can be recharged so running costs are zero.
- The orientation sensor automatically rotates portrait photos (and
apparently also helps to improve the white balance algorithm).
- Helpful panorama modes and easy to use stitching software.
Con:
- No case is supplied with the camera!
- The supplied memory card is a bit of a miserable size too.
- The battery is non-standard so you need to buy spares if going on holiday.
- The battery which came with the camera didn't appear to have much
capacity. I lost it before I could do any proper tests :-( A new battery from
EuroBattery appears to have much
better capacity, despite the same rating (850 mAh). I wish the larger capacity
batteries (1200 mAh) were available in the UK, but I've only seen them at
after5pm
and others in the USA.
- There is no indicator showing how much battery capacity is left. One minute
it works fine, the next it says "replace battery" and refuses to work.
- At first I found it easy to miss the fact that it was in movie mode instead
of photo mode and so ended up taking lots of small movies instead of photos!
- The cover on the USB/AV port looks flimsy and I can imagine the hinge
breaking quite soon if used regularly.
Comparison:
Summary:
- Don't let the negatives put you off; this is a very fine camera for the price.
Problems
These may be common to all digital cameras; I am investigating.
- Photos are sometimes unexpectedly blurred
- Snow storm on indoor photos in a large hall (ie. not much light and flash
too weak for the whole room) ("night spots"?)
For example:
crop and
close-up
- Blue fringing aroung trees in overexposed sky ("blooming"?)
For example:
crop and
close-up
- Grainy textures on things like shirts, even in good conditions such as
indoors with a flash. I found some software to fix this without losing
sharpness but haven't tested it yet - BreezeBrowser (also a fast image browser).
- Better results from EPSON RGB 2001 profile via PIM2 plugin?
Supplied software
I still haven't found my perfect photo management software but there is
one good thing about the supplied ZoomBrowser: simply open up a window on
a directory containing your new photos and it automatically rotates the
images to the correct orientation (landscape/portrait). Neat feature!
It uses information (embedded in the image file) from the orientation sensor
in the camera.
Other software
Download the Epson Print Image Matching
Photoshop Plugin which allows images files to have a different colour profile
applied, supposedly better quality colours. I haven't tested this fully yet.
Driver
Windows XP does not need a driver if you just want to download the photos
from the camera (set the camera to PTP mode). However you can install a
TWAIN driver (Windows 98,2000) or WIA driver (Windows ME,XP) to access
the camera if you want.
At the time of writing the latest driver is 5.0.0.
Firmware
At the time of writing the latest firmware to download is 1.0.2.0 but my
camera already has that version.
Links
Contact me
mail arb if you have any comments, questions, or would like to see some sample photographs.
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