A good quality, reasonably priced gem

This is one very good, very reasonably priced digital camera that offers good quality pictures and a stack of features. The fact that it was a 4.2 Megapixel digital camera, and that it was a Canon lens drew me toward it first, and I believe it’s the best in its class.

Stylish, compact design in stainless steal is a great complement, while being practical and durable (but I wouldn’t recommend dropping it!). This model replaces the Canon iXUS400, and mostly the differences are the swap from Compact flash memory to SD memory, a much thinner unit, and a much bigger screen. The screen is crisp, easy to read, and its size is perfect.

Its also got some fancy microchip processor that I’m not too sure about, all I know is that it makes it better, faster and sharper! (something to do with the efficiency of storage of some sort).

The only problem I have with the camera is that in comparison to the Ricoh Caplio 3.2 Megapixel camera, the quality of the image isn’t that much better, despite a supposedly better lens and more megapixels. In fact, when I take the same picture with both cameras at full quality and size, both images are about the same size (about 1.3mb). Surprising!

The video capture feature is also very good and crisp (for a digital camera), and if you enable the fast capture feature, you will get a much quicker and crisper recording for those fast moving shots.

There is no internal memory, only the expandable SD slot, which is an added bonus for me since it works with my laptop port and other digital camera, as well as offering the benefits of SD cards.

Uploading onto the PC can be done with your eyes closed (well, almost!). Simply install the software, plug up the camera, open the program, press the button alit on the camera, and its all done for you!

Overall, definitely a good camera to consider buying, hopefully the benefits from the transfer iXUS400 to iXUS40 will be also offered in the upcoming transfer of the iXUS500 to iXUS50.