Canon IXUS 65 | sample images
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Details at a glance
Megapixels: 6
Optical Zoom: 3x
Digital Zoom: 4x
LCD: 3 inches
Storage: SD/MMC
We clicked with
Huge screen, quality images, easy controls
Shots in the dark
No image stabiliser, colours can look a bit too much, other cameras offer better styling
Links
More Canon information
www.canon.co.uk
Price Comparison:
Canon Ixus 65
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It's hard to believe that it's 10 years since the first Ixus was presented to a drooling world. It's even harder to imagine that before the Ixus most compact cameras weren't particularly compact and many of them were downright ugly. The Ixus changed that and the 65 follows many of the design ideas - even down to printing “Canon” sideways so that it reads correctly when you wear the camera as jewellery.
Note: for reasons I will never understand, the Ixus range is known elsewhere in the world as the “Elph” - the Ixus 65 seems to be the same camera as the Digital Elph SD630. It's just that in the UK we get a cooler name for it.
Features
The first feature is one you might not even notice unless you are an Ixus groupie (and yes, this range is such a design icon that they really do exist). The Ixus 65 is the first Ixus not to have an optical viewfinder. In fact the Ixus range was slightly unusual in hanging onto the optical viewfinder as long as it did but it would be nice if they had retained it. Turn the camera round and it's very obvious why there is no optical viewfinder - there isn't space. The Canon Ixus 65 has an enormous 3 inch screen - there are hardly room for the controls let alone a viewfinder.
Other than that, the camera looks a little, well, basic when you look at the features but it does have a couple of nice surprises.
Touch sensitive controller
The 4 way controller has come of age. Practically every compact camera has a 4 way controller to help you around the menus and controls. Often this is made up of 4 separate buttons, sometimes it's a single pad. The four way controller on the Ixus 65 has to be the nicest I've comes across. It's a shiny silver ring that fits perfectly with the Ixus design motif of box and circle. Nudge it in the labelled directions and you can set ISO, flash, macro mode or continuous shooting. The really clever bit is that it is touch sensitive. Start to nudge it in one of the directions and a big graphic on the screen will show you what you are about to change. This looked like a cool gimmick - until I used the camera in a dark room. Instead of peering at the controls I could lay my finger on the control and see immediately whether I was about to push in the right direction. A simple thing but beautifully elegant and practical. You can turn it off if you don't want it.
Widescreen capture
So you have your widescreen TV, you bought some widescreen paper from Epson - you're going to want a widescreen shooting mode. The Ixus 65 has a 16:9 shooting mode in case you want pictures that perfectly match a widescreen TV. It also looks great for panoramics. You should note that this steps the camera down to 4.5 million pixels rather than its native 6MP.
Digic II, iSAPS, 9 point AiAF
OK, I copied those from the press release. Don't worry too much about the letters - what this means is that Canon have put some of their smartest focusing and image processing into this camera.
9 point AiAF should get the picture in focus correctly and very quickly. ISAPS (Intelligent Scene Analysis based on Photographic Space) is based on a huge amount of photographic data that tells the camera what the scene needs to look like. It allows the camera to balance exposure, focus and white balance to get the picture right first time. I'll spare you all the marketing hype that makes it sound like it can see into the future…
Digic II is Canon's flagship image processor. It merges functions that used to be found on 3 chips to give “remarkable” increases in camera control. It speeds up autofocus, start up time, shooting speeds and playback. Think of it as a turbo charger.
All these add up to one thing - Canon is pretty serious about this camera.
Handling
If you've ever picked up an Ixus then you'll know exactly what this camera looks like - they hit a design 10 years ago and stuck to it because it's a great design. The camera is almost exactly credit card sized but thicker than a couple of the ultra slim models we've seen. Most of the body appears to be plastic. There's just enough metal on there to keep to the Ixus ethic. The Ixus 65 feels heavier than you expect though - it's only 145g but something about it feels solid. It's also nicely balanced - without the battery you can tell the left side is much heavier than the right. Pop the battery in and it's perfectly balanced.
With a camera of this size there's always the problem of where to put your left hand. This is particularly true when there's a 3 inch screen on the back. However, the Ixus 65 is better than a lot of cameras for this. The top and bottom are square rather than rounded and it's easy to get a grip. The battery cover door is made of a different shinier plastic than the rest of the camera. Not only does this look cheap it feels cheap and flimsy. Since this is the only major moving part on the camera (apart from the lens assembly) I'd really like it if this could be toughened up. It would be very easy to bend it too far and snap it off.
As for the controls - well, Canon have been doing this a long time and it shows. I've already mentioned the 4 way controller. There are a “bunch” of scene modes. It's hard to count them since they are tucked away in a cunning shooting menu. This shows you 5 modes of Canon's choice and one of your choice. There's also a landscape and macro mode directly accessible from the 4 way controller. You can also dial in various “my colors” mode from the shooting menu in manual mode to give various greyscale, sepia and colour boost effects. That makes it sound like it's hard to find the scene mode you want but in reality it's rather simple. Much easier than, for example, wading through 37 modes on a single menu.
“My colors” can also be used after you have taken the shot in the review menu and this allows you to make some very subtle tweaks to the colours
Image quality
Remember all that stuff I said about Digic II, iSAPS and AiAF. It works. That's it - the Ixus 65 delivers well exposed pictures with lovely natural colours time after time.
I'm going to dwell on the negatives here - don't let that put you off, for the vast majority of shots the Canon Ixus 65 delivers beautiful pictures.
Using the flash can cause a colour shift - I took a close up picture of some green apples and without flash they look a little on the anaemic side of accurate. With flash they are rather a sickly yellow. This isn't a huge problem but it may point to a weakness in the white balancing with flash. On the majority of shots it would probably be unnoticeable and you could correct using “my colors” if it's not to your tasre.
The black and white mode is a little uninspiring. Pictures taken in it look flat and dull - exactly like if you do a “desaturate” in an image editor. It might do if you need a black and white picture without an editor but on most occasions you'd be better shooting in colour and converting to B&W on your computer.
Other than that - the pictures are great. The camera has a 2.8 lens which allows for some nice depth of field effects. Usually these are lacking on compacts because they have masses of depth of field due to small sensors. By providing a relatively fast lens, Canon allows you to create pictures with differential focus. These can look great but unfortunately there's no way to tell the camera to choose f2.8 - sometimes it will use the lens wide open and it's great, sometimes it isn't so great and sometimes it closes down to a smaller aperture and ruins your DOF. Purple fringing is also pretty much absent from this lens and the sensor delivers loads of quality. Don't let the relatively low pixel count fool you - this is one of the 6MP cameras that you can make nice big prints from if you want.
Shooting
The Canon Ixus 65 takes a couple of seconds to power up which is better than average for its class. Shot to shot time is rather sluggish - 10 shots took 15 seconds in “normal” shooting mode which around than 0.7 fps. That's pressing the button, releasing and pressing again. Shutter lag was barely noticeable - if you figure that this camera is on the good side of average for speed you'll get the right idea. Bteer than most but not as good as some.
What's not to like
This is going to sound shocking but I don't like the build quality. The Ixus 65 is better than a lot of compacts but it doesn't live up to the legendary build quality of the all stainless steel bodies of the classic Ixus or the ceramic metal composites made a couple of years ago. It feels good but not as good as I expected. This is really Canon's fault - they set the bar for beautiful metal bodies and other manufacturers have caught on. It's a shame that there is so little of the original metal in this camera.
As I already mentioned, colours can seem a little off when using flash. In general they are slightly on the saturated side of accurate. That's generally a nice thing but you might want to double check that you are in portrait mode when taking portraits to avoid over red faces.
It would also have been great to see image stabilisation on this camera. The zoom range isn't huge so it doesn't really need it but so many of its competitors have some form of IS that it seems an oversight not to include it here.
Camera specification
| Mega-pixels: | 6 |
Photo: | JPEG |
| Optical Z: | 3x |
RAW: | No |
| Digital Z: | 4x |
Aperture: | f/2.8-4.9 |
| LCD: | 2.5 inch |
Focal L: | equiv. 35-105mm |
| Dimensions: | 90 x 57 x 20 |
Shutter: | 15 sec to 1/1500 |
| Weight: | 175g |
Exposure: | ISO 80 to 800 |
| Storage: | SD/MMC |
Movie: | 640x480@30fps |
| Internal: | 16mb |
Battery: | Li-ion Li-4L |
| Interface: | USB 2.0, AV |
PictBridge: | Yes |
