Canon IXUS 220 HS Black

Product Information

The camera obviously functions at its best in good daylight conditions, so is an ideal sea and sun holiday companion in that respect. Despite its petite size, the ELPH 300 HS / IXUS 220 HS controls are well laid out and big enough to operate with your thumb. Also, as I`m not a professional, I might miss a term here and there, so please feel free to correct me and my conclusions. I doubt that it has much practical application and in fact it marks easily, but I loved the feel of it and it’s one of those things that makes a product attactive and desirable for no real practical reason.

Though the rear screen isn’t the largest or the highest resolution, it does the job, allowing you to assess detail after you’ve taken the shot, and compose with relative ease. And being able to set aperture or shutter speed with such a small sensor (and focal length) didn't seem terribly useful. It`s important to say that i-Contrast can be applied after the actual shot has been taken, through camera options, having much more control over the final image, but the results are not as good this way as when shot with i-Contrast in the first place (but it`s better than risking a ruined photo). The lens is 5x optical zoom, which is a 35mm equivalent of 24mm - 120mm and has image stabilisation to help reduce blur.

This unadulterated wide angle shot at 24mm equivalent setting and straight from the 220 HS reveals a good grasp of detail centre of the frame, getting progressively softer toward the corners.

Another maximum wide angle shot of a closer subject with plenty of inherent detail which will give a better impression of the crispness captured in the 220 HS’ 12 megapixel shots. Engage with our used photography equipment partner MPB in a forum dedicated to giving members the opportunity to feedback their experiences or seek advice.There are the usual fisheye and pinhole camera style effects, plus a super vivid setting and monochrome for those who want to inject an artistic moodiness into shots. Overall the Canon 220 HS has performed very respectably in this task, giving an identical showing to the marginally pricier 310 HS which boasts the exact same ISO range. The HS suffix stands for High Sensitivity and denotes the presence of a back illuminated CMOS sensor. Switch on Movie Digest and the camera will capture up to 4 seconds before a shot is taken and join them all together to create a single VGA movie. This is done by moving a rectangular frame up and down the screen and can be set in both horizontal and vertical planes either for portrait shots or where the subject just works better with the blurred regions to the left and right of the focus zone, rather than top and bottom.

The ELPH 300 HS / IXUS 220 HS is essentially a point and shoot compact and features Canon’s Smart Auto mode with scene detection, face detect AF and a range of scene modes including the Miniature, Toy Camera and Colour Accent Filter Effect.

Whilst finding Full HD on a budget model is both surprising and welcome, so too is the fact that stereo sound is offered, via two microphones lurking beneath adjacent pin pricks on the camera's top plate. Exciting it may not be, but at times you just want a camera that does the job of an aide memoire and don't want to spend a fortune to get it. No Powered IS, but dynamic IS is enough to keep the ELPH 300 HS / IXUS 220 HS very steady at the maximum 5x extent of the zoom.

I’ve owned and enjoyed APS and digital variants of Ixus cameras in the past so I was looking forward to getting my hands on the Canon Ixus 220 HS. I personally like manual settings, but this time I aimed for a camera for easy point-and-shoot without much thinking, not expecting perfect results but being able to capture emotion of the moment. Discover how Canon’s PTZ cameras, hardware controllers and apps can transform your remote, multi-camera setups.

That may sound like feint praise, and indeed it is – there’s little here that we haven’t witnessed before from the range. The camera is ready to take pictures within a couple of seconds of switching on and there is no significant lag from shot-to-shot. In its favour it certainly lives up to the IXUS heritage, stretching back a decade now, in being both easy to use yet maintaining a stylish almost sophisticated aura in spite of that.