Canon Ixus 55

The Canon Ixus 55 is compact, great images, burst shooting handy. good battery life. Had it for 2 years and loved it. Very impressed overall. Bad points are slow shutter lag, no battery meter, it simply stops.

I bought the Ixus 55 camera after looking at several in this price range by Canon, Sony and others. On first taking the camera in my hand, I was immediately struck by the high quality construction and flawless finish. The same thought that has gone into engineering the camera hardware is evident in the software too. It is possible to start taking snaps immediately thanks to the excellent and intuitive automatic modes. Most importantly, the images produced are very good indeed thanks to the advanced exposure and focus systems and the excellent lens and image sensor. The small dedicated lithium battery provides enough energy to cope with most situations. I recently used the camera on a week's holiday in the Sahara, and took about 200 photos together with about 10 minutes of video on my 1Gb SD. The battery held out until the last day, which was very impressive for a unit of this size. I would recommend taking along a second battery (there are inexpensive generic versions available) and also installing a high capacity storage card (again inexpensive) to allow the excellent video capabilities to be fully used. I would also suggest a few minutes looking through the manual settings in the main instruction manual will pay dividends. I used these to enhance the red of sunsets and the blue of clear skies producing striking images.

All in all an excellent small point-and-shoot digital camera. I would buy another.

I've been using Canon Ixus digi cameras for around 4 years now, first with the Ixus then the Ixus II and now the Ixus 55. Great quality prints, easy to use and represents good value for money.

Recommended.

I browsed the internet for many days trying to compare many types of digital cameras, and I finally got my choice with the Canon Ixus 55.

I upgraded to the Canon Ixus 55 5MP digital camera three months ago. The metallic casework and controls exude quality - very nice! What I found striking over my old camera (Casio EX-Z3) was the improvement in the quality of the images. Although the resolution is greater, it was the improvement in colour balance and vibrancy etc., that was most noticeable (pixel resolution is no guarantee of picture quality). In all, this camera has a much more realistic image capture.

As ever, the slight delay when pressing the shutter button is very annoying when trying to shoot unique moments! The built in flash works well, and will light subjects a good 10 - 15 feet from the lens. The 2.5" display makes reviewing images with friends more worthwhile, but the display marks easily though. The battery will easily last a week's holiday (with reasonable use). The charger is light and very compact if you need to take it away with you. There are a lot of different settings to play with, but as this is a pocket camera, I tend to leave the camera in fully automatic mode (I would opt for a digital SLR if I wanted to get more involved).

Skiers/mountaineers will like the "snow" mode which compensates for the exposure difficulties of shooting in this terrain. Video clips are very good quality with the 30fps at 640x480 setting. There's also a fast action mode. You will need a capacious SD card for any volume of video (minimum 512Mb or above). I use a high speed 2Gb card, which you can get for around £60 on EBay. The higher the speed the quicker the camera will be ready to take the next shot. Uploading to a PC is also quicker.

This is a great compact camera which takes great photo/video, and I am not in the least bit tempted to go for memory hungry higher mega-pixel resolutions. 5MP images print to A4 with great results. I have seen 5MP shots printed to A3 with great clarity too. The size and quality of the lens plays a big part in this. The question I would ask is: Can a compact camera lens do a 7MP CCD justice? This camera is just the quality of product that one would expect from a brand leading business such as Canon! EXCELLENT!

This is ultra small, very stylish and produces great pictures. The colour definition and sharpness is out of this world.