Canon IXUS 100 IS Reviews

Pros: Small, fast, clever, good quality shots.

Cons: Proprietary battery that wont charge through usb port.

Overall: When I first looked for my first digital pocket camera many years ago I dismissed the Canons because they were expensive, very slow to focus and fire and used proprietary memory cards and batteries.

I bought instead a Kodak, which I had for about 6 years until I dropped it, then a Nikon, both of these cameras were (compared to others) fast, used SD and AA batteries and were compact as well as having a viewfinder, which is something that most manufacturers dropped in order to accommodate a larger screen.

The Canon Ixus 100, however has proven to be just what I wanted, ticking almost all the boxes. It is very fast to focus and fire, it uses SD cards, and although using Canon batteries, I can appreciate that because it helps make the body so small.

Having a viewfinder makes it easier to use in bright sunlight (I live at the beach and glare makes trying to compose shots using the LCD impossible. The viewfinder also allows me to hold the camera steady against my face for low light shots of passing ships at night.

Its ability (at most times) to figure out that when I take photos of people on the beach that I want the exposure to measure my subjects and not the blinding white sand behind is very clever, admittedly this feature takes a bit of fiddling to get right. But a lack of that feature on previous cameras, meant I had to use fill flash if the subject was backlit.

The quality of the photos and the colours are nice, I am no expert so I use auto mode mostly, but I am experimenting with some of the manual features as I get more used to the camera.

Best of all it is small and fast. I can turn it on in an instant and pull off shots when others around are standing there holding their finger down waiting for their cameras to finally fire, so I don't miss any action or have subjects waiting around.

All in all I can see why Canon is so popular in the compact camera market.