Overview
The Canon IXUS 430 is a 4 megapixel digital camera with a 3x optical zoom lens. It is a very sleek and stylish camera and is aimed at people who would like a good looking camera that is easy to use. It is small, lightweight and portable. You can take it with you wherever you go as it will slip into a pocket quite easily. The build quality of the Canon IXUS 430 is excellent for a camera in this price range.
Getting started is straightforward and you can start taking pictures as soon as you have taken the camera out of the box, loaded the batteries and memory card.
Image Quality
It would be of little use if the Canon IXUS 430 looked good, but was unable to take good pictures. The camera comes with a high quality lens that is typical of Canon and therefore produces sharp images. Colours are vivid, in fact I believe that as a rule colours produced by Canon digital cameras are some of the best available.
Features
Outside of taking pictures in automatic mode the Canon IXUS 430 has a number of features that allow you to fine tune your photographs. These include letting you set Exposure Compensation and White Balance. These help you to improve your images in challenging lighting conditions.
Sensitivity can be varied between ISO 50 and 400. This is the equivalent of film speed on a traditional 35mm camera. In a nutshell ISO 50 is great for taking portraits on a sunny day, whilst ISO 400 captures action shots and shots where the lighting is poor.
For close up photography, perhaps of food and flowers there is a macro facility. This is available by pressing a button on the back of the camera. You can then take close ups from about six inches away from the subject.
Picture effects are available so that you can add a sepia tinge to your photographs or shoot in black and white. Other effects available are vivid, neutral and low sharpening.
To save space on the memory card you can also control resolution and picture quality. Shooting with a low resolution also enables you to produce images suitable for emailing and using on a website.
For those of you who like to get into the picture yourselves there is a self timer option available. The self timer can be set to either 2 or 10 seconds.
You can playback pictures on the LCD screen. You can view one picture at a time or nine. Being able to display nine at a time is certainly useful if you have a high capacity memory card full of images. There is also the facility to zoom into an image you are playing back to check the detail of a particular area. Voice memos of up to a minute can be added for each picture.
For those of you that would like to take a little more control over the production of the final image you can select between three types of metering and also set the shutter speed up to 15 seconds which is useful for night photography if you are using a tripod.
Printing is made easier with a dedicated print button. The Canon IXUS 430 is also Pict Bridge compatible. This allows it to send prints directly to a Pict Bridge compatible printer without the need to use a computer.
For those of you who like to shoot short movies the Canon IXUS 430 allows you to shoot for up to 3 minutes.
Ease of Use
The Canon IXUS 430 scores highly when it comes to ease of use. The camera has a fully automatic mode that allows you to just turn the camera on and start taking photographs. If you wish to switch to movie mode and shoot a short movie then you can do this just by turning a dial. To playback your images on the LCD screen all you need to do is push a slider along. It is fairly simple to adjust the White Balance and Exposure Compensation settings through the function screen if you wish to do so.
Cost
If you shop around you should be able to find the Canon IXUS 430 for around £250.
Style
The Canon IXUS 430 is all about style. Its sleek design will appeal to people who like to own cameras that get noticed almost as much as the pictures it takes. In my view there are some trade offs that need to be recognized when compared to shall we say less pretty digital cameras. For a start style comes at a price, so expect to pay a premium. The fact that the camera will slide into your pocket may be a big plus point, but it also means that the controls and buttons are also downsized. Just as important the LCD screen is only 1.5". A little on the small size for my own personal liking. Other cameras also offer scene modes to help you take the best possible pictures in different lighting situations. Again these are missing from this range.
Battery and Memory Cards
Power is supplied to the Canon IXUS 430 through a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery. It is the only type of battery that the camera will use and you would therefore be wise to consider buying a spare battery for when the one supplied with the camera is being recharged. To recharge a completely flat battery takes around two hours. As with all digital cameras you need to keep an eye on battery consumption, but the Canon IXUS 430 will take around 200 shots before the battery needs recharging. That should suit most users of this type of camera.
Images are stored on a Compact Flash card. As image sizes increase an additional, high capacity storage card almost becomes a necessity. The 32mb card supplied soon gets full and I would advise a minimum of a 128mb capacity card. As card prices continue to fall even 512mb capacity cards should be considered if you don't want to clear down the memory card on a regular basis.
Conclusion
If style means a lot to you then the Canon IXUS 430 certainly looks the part. It is more than just its good looks that will get it noticed and its ease of use will appeal to anyone who wants to take good quality pictures without needing to wade through a manual the size of an encyclopedia. The Canon IXUS 430 is about as straightforward as they come. If you are looking to make slightly larger prints then you should also consider the IXUS 500. This is more or less the same camera but it has 5 megapixels compared to this ones 4 megapixels. Click for: Specification
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Related Pages
Canon IXUS 430 Review Canon IXUS 430 Specification Canon IXUS 430 Sample Images
