Playback Controls

In playback mode the display and switching of images is fast and the images appear 'at once' rather than progressively down the LCD. Entering menu mode gives you the following menu options:

You can move from image to image by using the +/- buttons, or enter 9 at a time thumbnail mode by pressing MULTI. JUMP allows you to page through thumbnails of 9 images one page at a a time.

An image may be deleted on the fly by pressing SET and - together.

Setup Menu

Record Menu

Continual Shooting / Burst Mode

Drive is only available in programmable mode (P) and when selected will force the camera into low resolution (768x512). This also opens up the higher ISO ratings of 200 / 400. And faster shutter speeds. Pressing and holding down the shutter the camera will first pre-focus then take images at about 2fps for a maximum of 20 frames (10 seconds).

After a little experimentation in drive mode, manually adjust the aperture settings and exposure adjustment (and in bright light) the camera can achieve shutter speeds of 1/3000s (up to 1/8000s) which is fast enough to freeze all sorts of fast action:

Using the same drive mode produced the following stop-motion animation:

Timing / File Sizes

Switching the camera on from cold it's ready to take a photograph in only 3 seconds which is a huge improvement over older digicams, switching from OFF to play mode takes about 7 seconds and moving between images (using the + / - buttons) takes only 2 seconds, thumbnail mode is very quick, as the CIFF format used by the camera creates thumbnail files as well as the full sized image.

Pre-focusing the camera takes between 2 and 4 seconds depending on how hard it is to focus and whether it has to use the built in 'focus assist light' which projects a circle with a white line through it onto the subject. Once pre-focused the shutter lag is <>><>> and the storage of the image (cycle time until it's ready to take another shot) depends on the selected image quality (see table below).

File sizes for different image formats are shown in the table below

* Unlike other cameras the Canon JPEG modes seem to vary in their file size quite wildly, however the average size in FINE mode is about 320Kb.

** This compares very favourably with the 4Mb file size of uncompressed images in other cameras.