Canon Ixus 130

The Ixus 130 is the latest addition to Canon's range of compact cameras, with a super-slim design, excellent finish and high-end spec. The main new feature is the 14.1-Megapixel sensor, which, although not entirely necessary, is an absolute must when it comes to keeping up with the competition.

Handling

Canon has an eye for design, and it's no real surprise that the Ixus 130 is a very nice camera to handle. It's incredibly compact and just 18 mm thick, which is pretty impressive for a camera that's packed with so many functions. The metal finish is superb and the slight curve to the camera body is particularly pleasing. The Ixus 130 is available in silver, black, orange and pink with hues that are definitely more eye-catching than the more subdued tones of Canon's previous range of compacts.
The smooth camera body is almost entirely flat, with just a few protruding controls such as the auto/photo/video mode switch. Previously located around the shutter-release button, the zoom controls have now been scaled down to a tiny little lever that's a bit fiddly to use, a feature that's unfortunately becoming more and more common on cameras these days. The rest of the buttons are mounted flush to the camera body and, to be honest, they're more about style than ease of handling.


The 2.7-inch rear screen still displays a mere 230,000 dots. On a top-of-the-range model like this, it would have been nice to have a few more pixels to improve quality when lining up a picture. That's a minor point though, as the Ixus 130's LCD is perfectly pleasant to use with smooth movements, relatively accurate colour reproduction and fairly wide viewing angles. It is not, however, immune to the typical drawbacks of the LCD, as in low light the display becomes jerky, and in bright light, reflections can make it tricky to see exactly what you're doing.

As is often the case with Canon cameras, the user interface is very well designed with simple menus that are easy to understand and which have an integrated help facility.


Responsiveness

The compact Ixus 130 proved a pretty speedy camera in most situations with focusing taking less than a second and detection just a tad slower as the light begins to fade. The start-up time is respectable at just over a second. The Ixus' burst mode problems are back again though with a shot frequency of 0.7 fps and a shot-to-shot recording time of around two seconds. On this point, at least, the Ixus could do better.

Picture quality

As with the previous model, the Ixus 130 has a 4x, 28 - 112 mm, f/2.8-5.9 zoom. Aperture reduces fairly sharply the more you use the zoom. In fact, with the zoom just halfway out, the maximum aperture is reduced to f/4. In wide-angle mode, the picture is sharp and well-defined in the centre, but the edges quickly become blurred and plagued with purple fringes. Chromatic aberrations are well controlled but are definitely 100% visible. Switching to telephoto mode makes the pictures a little more consistent even if they're less sharp on the whole. Chromatic aberrations are barely noticeable.


So how does the 14-Megapixel sensor get on at high sensitivity settings? Although pretty much invisible at 80 and 100 ISO, granularity starts to appear at 200 ISO, although without too much colour noise. At 400 ISO, you'll notice a loss in contrast but detail in the picture is still perfectly visible. As is often the case above 400 ISO, smoothing is extremely noticeable and fine detail all-but disappears, making the whole image look undefined and blurred. This effect is distinctly present at 1600 ISO, even on the A4 print-outs we made of our test scene.

Optical stabilisation works quite well and decent photos can be obtained with shutter speeds of between 1/8 and 1/6 seconds. The 3 cm macro mode works well too. All in all then, the Ixus lens a good all-rounder.

Video

The Ixus 130 can film high-quality 720p HD video (.MOV H.264). Unfortunately, it's still not possible to use the optical zoom while you film and the sound frustratingly remains in mono. It's a shame, actually, that Canon didn't take this opportunity to improve the Ixus in this field. Finally, it's always nice to see a mini HDMI output for instant video or photo playback on a compatible TV.