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Archive for November, 2010

It’s that time of year again, when somebody decides to hold the annual Stockholm photo expo, right around the 25th when everyone gets their salary. Seriously, people have got to stop doing that…
After missing last years’ photo expo I was happy to return and get a chance to play with the stuff they had on show. Being a total geek, I’ve already played with most of the gadgets, and since there were really no new releases planned for the show, I was just happy to be in an environment with that much technology. One thing that I haven’t played with prior to the photo expo, is Fujifilm’s FinePix Real 3D W3, a compact camera that like the name says shoots 3D. It’s basically two cameras in one, so two separate lenses and sensors, that get piped into the same processor for some image processing wizardry. Kinda nifty, but then at the same time kinda gimicky, since nobody actually goes around with a pair of 3D glasses.

One of my images was on display there, through Kth’s photo club, Knepp.

Anyway, I shot some video of the expo, Knepp’s wall can be seen at around 4:11 into the video. My image is the framed pano in the middle.

So the inevitable happened…I finally succumbed and bought a compact camera. Now I dislike compacts with a passion, they’re small, not ergonomic, have a very plastic feel to them even though some are made of metal, produce noisy images, don’t have much in the way of manual settings unless you get a Canon G series, and so on…
However, due to breaking my right wrist (i’m right-handed) i couldn’t lug the 50D around so i needed something smaller as a dump-in-my-jacket-pocket, take everywhere camera, and I needed it to shoot somewhat decent 720p video. In comes the Ixus 130. Knowing I wasn’t gonna demand much from it, I went for the 130 instead of the 210 touchscreen model, and I fell in love, so much so i’m thinking of ways to get my Macbook anodized in orange…

It’s got a decent build, most Ixuses do, looks amazing, especially in orange, is pretty much the size of a credit card and only slightly thicker than an iPhone, so it’s great to just have on you. The image and video quality is comparable to other cameras at the same price point. For someone who dislikes using the auto mode on anything, this little camera’s auto mode is actually impressively smart, not resorting to flash every time there’s a little less light than it would like to have.

And now for the drawbacks….it’s small and sleek, which is great if you’re just admiring it while it sits on a shelf, the surface isn’t too grip friendly and the buttons are small for my fat fingers, especially the D-pad. From what i’ve seen so far, it’s noisy above ISO 200. I do’t really know if that’s normal for a pocket camera, since so far i’ve tried avoiding them like the plague, but crank the 50D to ISO 1600 and it’ll almost beat ISO 200 on the Ixus 130. The exclusion of optical zoom in the video mode is an annoyance but I guess that at this price point Canon had to leave something out. In other words I’m eagerly waiting for CHDK to start supporting the Ixus 130.

Sample images:

Sample 720p videos: