Canon Digital IXUS 980 IS Reviews: Digital Compact Camera

+ Excellent image quality. Excellent build quality. Compact and comfortable to hold. Controls are intuitive and considering the range of features are the best I have experienced. Face recognition is effective and very useful

- Slow response at lower ambient light levels, has caused me to miss shots. A custom leather case would be a much better option than the cloth fabric case offered.

+ Small, light and pocket size. Good quality photos can be achieved. It is great as a point and shoot but also has manual settings for more advanced use.

- The manual is on a CD but it would be better to have a manual in paper form included to check operation points while out and about.

+ build,battery life,image quality

- little fiddly to change settings,

+ solid and robust. brilliant quality photos, very quick off to ready time.

- does not come with a cover or protective bag

+ small good to put in pocket

- none

+ Handy size that packs in a good file size, easy to slip int your pocket.

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+ Packed with useful features: Spend a little time learning how to navigate and most become easy to use and rewarding. Of course you can snap away happily without ever troubling to explore its versatility, and you will get very good results. But this is not a cheap snapshot camera- it's much more than that. I think you should be able to control depth of field, although I have yet to experiment with that. The main 'extra' feature I needed was a viewfinder after trying to use my wife's Exilim in bright sunlight- the display was just not visible. This Ixus 980 IS has a much better display, and so far I have hardly used the viewfinder- but I feel it will be a sad day when nobody includes this feature somewhere in their range. The viewfinder keeps up with the optical zoom but see bad points... In the 'Bad Points' I have criticised one aspect of the video feature. Apart from that it makes quite a decent steady and easy to watch movie, with sound. Although I have picked fault with some aspects of the IXUS 980 IS, overall I am extremely pleased with it, enjoy using it and am very pleased with the resulting photographs. Compact and not too heavy. It is not as versatile as a DSLR- you could hardly expect it to be- but its size and weight mean you are a hundred times more likely to have it with you when an unexpected opportunity crops up. And it will almost certainly reward you with a very good result. I take it almost everywhere- it's not much bigger or heavier than a mobile phone.
Overall I am extremely pleased with this little gem, and feel it was well worth the effort of researching the market. And worth the effort of reading the 170 page user guide. If you want a lot more than a snap-shot camera, download the Ixus 980 IS full specification and get ready for some real enjoyment!

- Appearance is not to my liking but my appreciation of design is a bit sixties, so younger users will probably be happy with it. In any case it is such a good camera I would still enjoy using it if it looked like a used tea bag. That 'oh so necessary' viewfinder image is a bit like looking into the wrong end of a telescope- it is the least well thought out feature but it does work and I am pleased it is there. Other 'Bad Points': The top ON/OFF button is difficult to press, being small & flush. You can switch on using the easier 'playback' button. This immediately shows your last photo and you can easily scroll back, but pressing the shutter button half way brings the lens out and you can shoot as usual. But you still have to switch off with the awkward ON/OFF button. The video function is quite good but... I have not found a way of keeping the focus in operation, so it starts off sharp then loses focus if the subject moves in or out. If video is important to you, there is another Ixus model (cheaper) which has HD. It might manage auto focus, but I have not checked. The User Guide is a reduced photocopy effort- not up to the standard of the rest of the product. But it is readable and fairly thorough.

+ There are numerous good points. The camera is feature packed and spec'd to a level which you'd expect to find in a DSLR. The pre-programmable print button is great feature for assigning various options (I've assigned mine for one touch manual white balance control- great for vivid underwater shots [although the scene underwater mode is also excellent]). The battery life is great, build quality superb and image quality fantastic. Having just returned from a diving trip to Scapa Flow (Orkney's) I now have a SDHC card with over 300 high res images both on land and underwater. It'll be a struggle to decide which ones to print, as there are many gems! These cameras are a must for any diver wanting to purchase a camera with manual white balance control, without running to the expense of a DSLR. The camera is a doddle to operate and the supplied software allows for a good degree of post image editing.....not that you should really need to with this camera in your pocket! For those wishing for a similar spec but with a large zoom I'd suggest the G10, which has the same number of features but comes with a larger zoom lens.

- Due to its compact architecture, the flash is a little close to the lens. Consequently when used with an underwater housing a shadow effect occure owards the lower right hand side of the image. This can be eliminated with the use of a separate underwater strobe, a worthwile investment for any keen underwater photographer. The digital zoom isn't worth using unless you have a very steady hand or tripod, as the noise created even in lower res shots can dramatically reduce the quality of the image. VGA movie recording rather than high definition has its drawbacks (although the camera was launched in October 2008, and technology has moved on. HD isn't the be-all and end-all in fact I've heard that people need to reduce the number of frames per second in order to playback many HD movies shot on cameras as their frame rate exceeds current DVD playback speeds.)

+ Excellent image quality, even in low light conditions. The 'auto' setting is adequate for pretty well any conditions or situations that I have so-far encountered. It's very useful to have a viewfinder, an item that is beginning to disappear from digital cameras. The movie-clip quality is very high, including the sound. In an editing suite it's almost impossible to distinguish between the video from the IXUS and the video from my Sony Handycam. The camera is very small and light and an underwater housing is available for scuba.

- It's quite difficult to get perfect focus when using the 'macro' setting to photograph very small objects. It seems to work best if you position the red dot from the camera's led beam slightly in front of what you want to photograph. Once you get the autofocus right though the image quality is excellent. It's sometimes difficult to know whether you have successfully switched off the flash, as both 'on' and 'off' symbols are very similar and very small. The combination of zoom and macro seems to throw the autofocus out slightly. It's better to move the camera closer to the subject.

+ great auto feature where you can point n take resolution makes even paper prints are excellent quality

- none i can see

+ Hi res, nice handling

- Over complex, non intuitive menus, diddly and poor quality photocopied instructions obviosly a grey import - not made clear on Simply's website

+ Very neat and compact mid-price camera with a good feel in the hand. Small enough to carry around easily. Gd LCD quality. Still v new so haven't had a chance to explore all the features.

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+ manual white balance

- Not found one yet

+ all what i need fron a point and shoot

- feels like a toy?

+ I was able to try out all the functions and get to grips with most in one Sunday afternoon. The controls and displays were easy to use and the manual surprisingly easy to follow.
When using the underwater housing it was easy to use all the buttons, to change settings/functions when wearing 3mm diving gloves, more difficult with thicker gloves.
The macro was brilliant, very easy to check live focus, it will be great for small criters like the Pigmy sea horses and nudibranch.

- I had read the Canon website about the produst and expected to be able to choose/define a white balance setting when using the Underwater mode, this is not an available option. However the Underwater setting does seem to compensate to a limited degree for white balance problems.
If using the flask and the underwater housing a shadow is produced by the lens extension 'tube'.. I will need to buy an external strobe.