HD Video on Canon Ixus 110IS / Powershot SD960 IS

Due to some hot pixels that recently erupted on my trusty old Canon SD800 IS, I decided to upgrade to a new Canon DiG!C 4 based point & shoot. The main reason I got the SD800 3 years ago was the wide 28mm lens. The newly released Ixus 110IS/SD960 IS is the latest evolution of the "wide angle" point & shoot from Canon. The new camera also sports an HD recording mode which really improves the video performance as compared with the SD800. Since these small P&S cameras with tiny CCD sensors and crazy megapixel counts (12.1MP in this case) are notorious for noisy low-light performance, I thought I'd test it out on my walk home.

I've uploaded two videos to YouTube which will quickly show you how well this camera works when shooting hand-held in low light.

Video 1: Dusk (YouTube)
Video 2: Night (YoutTube)

The videos as shown on YouTube are heavily compressed by YouTube and therefore appear quite low in quality. If you have the patience to download the original MOV files from the camera you can find them here - be warned, they are very large files.

Video 1: Dusk (86MB .MOV File)
Video 2: Night (57MB .MOV File)

I've had the camera for basically a day and have three comments:

1) The OPTICAL zoom doesn't work while shooting video and the reason for this (they actually mention it in the manual) is that the microphone would pick up the sound of the zoom motor. You can still do a DIGITAL zoom (which is silent), but obviously at lower quality.

2) I really don't like the look of the camera itself. I wish they kept the older more angular look of the Elph/IXUS/Powershot range.

3) The camera is packed with new whiz-bang features (blink detection, Wii-style interface, etc.) that I still have to play with. It does seem to take nice pictures though :)
Posted by at
Labels: ,

10 comments:

  1. Brad Aurisch12 March 2009 at 21:52

    OMG that looks fantastic! That's my birthday present :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous13 March 2009 at 17:44

    Thanks for the video samples. Is it fixed focus in movie mode like earlier models?

    ReplyDelete
  3. ambor13 March 2009 at 17:49

    Shane, yes, the focus is fixed once you start the video.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown15 March 2009 at 05:45

    Hi! I'm the beginner of video taking!
    Could you please tell me how long can this DC take per movie and how long of this DC's battery can last for when taking movie? Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown15 March 2009 at 05:48

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  6. ambor15 March 2009 at 22:21

    Billy, according to the manual the maximum time for each movie is 29m59s. You can have more than one movie on an SD card, so on an 8GB card, you can have a total of 43m32s. There is no spec about the battery.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Unknown27 March 2009 at 07:33

    Is time lapse possible with this camera?

    ReplyDelete
  8. ambor28 March 2009 at 07:44

    There is a full thread of discussion on this here:

    http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1010&message=31279203

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous10 July 2009 at 03:03

    I'm having problems editing movies in canon's zoombrowser. For unknown reason audio is twice speed it should be. Any one else got same problem.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous12 July 2009 at 04:00

    The above was caused with a conflict with a programme I had called Inter Video Audio Decoder. I removed it and ZoomBrowser works okay. Incidently the same error - speeded up sound - occurred when using Windows Movie Maker.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)