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The Ixus brand is usually associated with luxury rather than good value, but Canon has combined both in this latest entry-level model. Its curved metal body looks gorgeous, and it’s backed up by some impressive specs including optical stabilisation, a 3in LCD screen, an HDMI output and 1080p video recording.
It’s extremely petite, but we’d have preferred a few extra millimetres’ width to give more room for the controls. The small navigation pad sits flush with the camera body, making it fiddly to use. A switch on the top toggles between Auto mode and whichever other mode was last selected. The options include various scene presets, a panorama stitch function and slow-motion video capture, which records at 240fps, playing back at 30fps for 8x slow-motion. The 320×240 resolution looks blocky but there’s still lots of fun to be had here.
A Program mode also nestles among these options and provides access to ISO speed, white balance, metering and a generous selection of other picture tweaks. Performance in normal use was nothing special at 2.5 seconds between shots, but continuous mode was seriously fast, running at 2.2fps until the card was full.
The main video mode has its own record button, and captures at the Full HD 1920×1080 resolution at 24fps. AVC compression and the high 34Mbit/s bit rate ensure excellent quality, although this also produces big files that require a fast PC to play. Clip lengths are limited to around 15 minutes. Focus and zoom are fixed for the duration of clips, which is disappointing but typical at this price. Regardless, the high quality soundtrack, smooth colours and impeccable details of the 115 HS’s videos are way beyond anything else we’ve seen at this price.
Crisp detail in outdoor photos – click to zoom image
Photo quality was just as impressive. Outdoor shots were crisp, smooth and vibrant, with excellent focus right into the corners of frames and throughout the 4x zoom range. Indoors, a combination of optical stabilisation, well-judged automatic settings and remarkably low noise at the top ISO 1600 setting produced outstanding results. Details were soft at ISO 1600 but they didn’t look too blotchy or heavily processed.
Fiddly buttons aside, this is an exceptional point-and-shoot camera, and a bargain to boot.
