I would describe this camera in one word - awesome.
I've been using the camera for two months now, pushing it to its limits under rather difficult lighting and movement conditions, and really happy with it.
First a caveat - fully auto mode takes good pictures but only outdoors in daylight and indoors with flash and a reasonable amount of lighting. 80% of family and social shots would fall into this category.
Any more difficult lighting conditions, and you need to switch to the special scene mode or manual. There's no fully manual mode, but there's plenty you can do to tweak the camera to match shooting conditions.
I used the portrait mode under a variety of conditions, including lighted indoors without flash, and the picture quality was good. It gets grainy with darker rooms, probably due to higher ISO being automatically selected.
The manual Long Shutter capability is good stuff. I used it to take a beautiful photo of the family at dinner, with just candle light and no flash, with a tripod. I wouldn't have believed I could get a good shot there with anything short of an SLR or DSLR.
Final advice - take the trouble to read and understand the instruction book fully. And don't worry if you get some bad shots as you learn to use its features.
If you are looking for a very capable and quality compact Point and Shoot camera, and don't mind paying a bit more, the Ixus 850IS is definitely worth considering.
Problems:
Nothing annoying so far. I got the same flash white spots which some users reported, but they are likely reflections from various objects. They appear at random, nothing wrong with the camera itself.
I've been using the camera for two months now, pushing it to its limits under rather difficult lighting and movement conditions, and really happy with it.
First a caveat - fully auto mode takes good pictures but only outdoors in daylight and indoors with flash and a reasonable amount of lighting. 80% of family and social shots would fall into this category.
Any more difficult lighting conditions, and you need to switch to the special scene mode or manual. There's no fully manual mode, but there's plenty you can do to tweak the camera to match shooting conditions.
I used the portrait mode under a variety of conditions, including lighted indoors without flash, and the picture quality was good. It gets grainy with darker rooms, probably due to higher ISO being automatically selected.
The manual Long Shutter capability is good stuff. I used it to take a beautiful photo of the family at dinner, with just candle light and no flash, with a tripod. I wouldn't have believed I could get a good shot there with anything short of an SLR or DSLR.
Final advice - take the trouble to read and understand the instruction book fully. And don't worry if you get some bad shots as you learn to use its features.
If you are looking for a very capable and quality compact Point and Shoot camera, and don't mind paying a bit more, the Ixus 850IS is definitely worth considering.
Problems:
Nothing annoying so far. I got the same flash white spots which some users reported, but they are likely reflections from various objects. They appear at random, nothing wrong with the camera itself.