Canon Ixus 800 IS Review

Good Points
Excellent image quality, very good movie mode (- sound), great features, support for 4gb SD cards, good battery

Bad Points
Image stabaliser could have been more, lack of docking cradle

General Comments
This is the 4th digital camera I have owned, and this Canon IXUS 800 IS is well on the way towards the perfect camera. It's stylish and fairly compact but manages to produce great images with little noise, even in low light conditions. It produces very good movies which on a TV look like DVD's, by far the best 640x480 30 fps movie mode I've seen (except for the sound, more later..).



The features, such as colour swapping, and enhancing one colour can produce some really individual photos. The normal black and white, sepia, etc, modes are also included. The camera is fairly easy to use, both in point and shoot mode, and if you want to be more creative, in manual mode.



The downsides, the image stabiliser will not save shaky or night pictures, but what it will do is help low light photos and slight movement. In a few generations it will have improved, but for now, don't think it will correct everything. Also the fact you have to open the slightly flimsy hatch to plug in the USB cable or take the ccard out is annoying, a dock would have been much better.



My main gripe with this is sound recording in movie mode, its very good - except for whatever the noise level is a constant dull hissing, looking into this more, apparently its a common thing in Canon's at the moment. Why oh why Canon can't fix this I don't know.



All in all, a great little camera, with great image quality and great features, you won't be dissapointed with this camera.