Canon Digital IXUS 50

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,39189820,00.htm

Reviewed 24 June 2005

Reviewed by David D. Busch

This 5-megapixel addition to the Canon Digital IXUS line has more in common with its 4-megapixel IXUS 40 sibling than it does with the top-of-the-line 7-megapixel IXUS 700. Instead of the slightly larger, curvier body found in its higher-resolution stablemate, this IXUS has the same boxy ultracompact frame as the IXUS 40 and shares virtually every other spec except resolution. What you get for your £30 extra is improved image quality -- and that might be enough.

While we faulted the IXUS 40 for its average image quality, we were impressed by the performance, unrelenting burst capabilities and great battery life that are equally evident in this upgrade. If you're looking for an ultracompact snapshot camera and don't need manual controls, lots of scene modes or a powerful electronic flash, the marginally better image quality of this unit may lure you into the Canon fold.

Design
The Canon Digital IXUS 50 looks good and feels good in your hands. At a lightweight 130g and with dimensions of 86 by 53 by 20mm, it won't create an unsightly saggy pocket. Although large hands may have trouble curling around this tiny package, a two-handed grip is your best bet for getting a steady shot, since your index finger operates both the shutter-release button mounted on the top surface and the concentric zoom lever.

Instead of a mode dial, this switch lets you select shooting and playback modes

Canon manages to pack a lot of components into a limited amount of space. For example, the front surface hosts the 3x zoom lens -- which retracts flush behind a protective cover when powered down -- a tiny microphone, a focus-assist lamp, an electronic flash and an optical viewfinder window. The bottom edge includes an honest-to-gosh metal (not plastic) tripod socket and a cover for the battery and the SD/MMC memory card. One side edge has a flip-up access door for the I/O connectors.

The four-way controller and a few buttons on the back of the camera let you change settings

Other than a recessed power button and a green LED power light on top, all the key controls are bunched on the right side of the back panel, next to the 51mm (2-inch) LCD. The most common settings can be adjusted with the four-way cursor pad. You press up to switch between spot, centre-weighted and evaluative metering, while down cycles between single-shot, burst and 2-second to 10-second self-timer modes. Left selects normal, landscape or macro focus and right activates automatic, forced-on, red-eye, slow-sync, forced-off and speedlight flash modes.

There's little on top of the camera aside from the shutter release, the power button and the zoom toggle

There's no mode dial on the IXUS 50. Jumping from picture review to movie to photo mode is accomplished with a three-way sliding switch, while scene options are invoked from a menu that pops up when you press the Set/Function button in the centre of the four-way cursor pad. The function menu also provides access to important controls such as exposure compensation (±2EV in 1/3EV steps), ISO (50 to 400), compression ratio and resolution.

A separate menu key pops up three pages of choices for shooting, setup and customisation. There's also a display button to cycle through the LCD status and preview options. A small button marked with a dot activates printing and sharing features.

Features
The Canon Digital IXUS 50's feature set is, like its IXUS 40 counterpart's, a quirky mix of minimalist features with a few interesting add-ons. For example, only six scene modes are available, but one of them is an underwater option that's useful with an optional Canon waterproof housing. The remaining five range from the mundane (Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets and Indoor) to the unusual: a Digital Macro option that uses the zoom lever to expand a user-selectable portion of the image to fill the frame.

There's also a clever My Colors mode that lets you increase the saturation of red, green or blue hues, darken or lighten skin tones, swap colours, desaturate all colours but one and adjust colour balance. Unfortunately, there's no sports/action mode, nor is there any manual control over shutter speed or f-stop, which would have taken advantage of this camera's great burst capabilities.

You can save images and video on an SD or MMC card with the IXUS 50

The 3x zoom offers a good compromise between wide-angle view and telephoto reach, with a 35mm-to-105mm (35mm-camera equivalent) range. But the limited number of zoom steps made choosing the right focal length a jerky hit-or-miss proposition. The good news is that the nine-point or centre-spot autofocus system works well down to 30mm, although you'll need to use the LCD for framing because the tiny optical viewfinder is woefully uncorrected for parallax.

You can choose evaluative, centre-weighted or spot metering, and the camera will automatically select shutter speeds from 15 seconds to 1/1,500 of a second and f-stops from f/2.8 to f/4.9. Automatic noise reduction kicks in for exposures longer than 1.3 seconds. As is common with ultracompact cameras housing a tiny battery, Canon conserves juice by underpowering the flash unit, limiting it to 3.5m in wide-angle mode and just 2m at the telephoto setting when ISO is set to Auto.

Another quirky feature is this IXUS's high-speed 60-frame-per-second mode, which can shoot half-speed slow motion at 320x240 resolution for as long as 60 seconds. Opt for near-TV-quality 640x480 clips with monaural sound at 30fps, and you can shoot until your memory card fills up.

Performance
Like the IXUS 40, the IXUS 50 uses Canon's Digic II DSP to boost performance to impressive levels. Shutter lag was quick at 0.5 second under high-contrast lighting and respectable at 1.1 seconds under low-contrast lighting with the focus-assist switched on. A time-to-first-picture clocking of just 2.2 seconds means you won't wait long to snap off that impulse shot, and you'll be able to keep shooting every 1.62 seconds thereafter (3.01 seconds with flash).

The diminutive lithium-ion battery held up well in our tests

Burst mode was a joy to use. You can shoot full-resolution photos until your trigger finger tires -- we filled up our memory card with 143 shots in 110 seconds at a 1.3fps clip. When we dropped down to 640x480 resolution, the IXUS 50 plugged away at 1.7fps for 3 full minutes before we halted the test.

Battery life from the 760mAh lithium-ion cell was also excellent, scoring 782 shots from a single charge, half of them with flash, intermixed with plenty of zooming, picture review and card formatting to eat up juice. About 50 shots before the power gave up, a red indicator flashed a warning, but nothing signalled waning battery life before that.

The LCD viewfinder worked better under dim lighting conditions than it did in bright sunlight, as direct illumination tended to wash out the display. Even though there was ghosting when the camera or subject moved, the LCD was still a better choice for framing than the inaccurate optical viewfinder, which showed only 82 per cent of the subject area.

Image quality
This camera's image quality was marginally better than that of its 4-megapixel sibling, although both were a little disappointing. The Canon Digital IXUS 50 produced photos that were sharper than the IXUS 40's, but other 5-megapixel cameras in this class have done better, particularly at the telephoto zoom position. On the plus side, there was a good range of detail in shadows and highlights, although it was often masked by JPEG artefacts. Colour saturation was somewhat muted at the default setting, and flesh tones showed a tendency toward yellow casts.

Chromatic aberration cropped up as purple fringing around backlit subject matter. Noise, not much of a problem at ISO 50 or ISO 100, was quite evident at the ISO 400 high end of the sensitivity range. While the flash provided even illumination beyond its nominal range, thanks to an automatic ISO boost, the resulting photos suffered from excessive noise. In addition, the red-eye-reduction feature didn't have much of an effect.

Edited by Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by Nick Hide