Purchased:

Price: 399 Euro
at: Hauschild, Darmstadt, Germany
on June 5th 2004

Pictures:

Have a look at the pictures I made from the camera itself. The pictures are made with the Canon A40 of my brother.

First impression:

I was using the Canon Digital IXUS (aka. S100 Digital Elph) for about 4 years and made about 20.000 pictures with it. I was very satisfied with this nice camera, but I thought it would be time for a new toy.
I bought the Canon Digital IXUS 500 (aka. S500 Digital Elph) two months ago and made about 2000 pictures with it.
My first impression of the camera was very good. I first noticed that it is much faster than my old IXUS, when shooting several pictures in a sequence. Also I noticed the new focus system, which shows me, which parts of the image it regards as the relevant ones. I made the first picture series on my birthday with difficult light conditions, but the camera performed very well. No focus problems, all images are very sharp and the colors are excellent. I think they made some big improvements over the last years. You can have a look at the pictures here.

Image Quality:

I am very satisfied with the image quality of the IXUS 500. The colors are much better than on my old IXUS. Also the high resolution of 5 mega pixels is very nice. If you zoom into the pictures you can see that even the last pixel is sharp.
To get an impression of the quality have a look at the full resolution pictures below. Click on a picture to get a full resolution version of it.

If you want to get a deeper impression of the image quality you can look at some of the picture series I made with the IXUS 500:

Long time exposure experiments

Indoor pictures with very low light (at a party)

Outdoor pictures with flash at night (again at a party)

Outdoor pictures at day with cloudy sky

Outdoor pictures at day with sun light

As I said: I am very satisfied with the quality and colors of the pictures.

Video Mode:

One thing I like very much about the camera is the ability to record short video clips. In contrast to older models the IXUS 500 can record them in 640x480 which makes them look much more brilliant.

To give you an impression of the difference between videos recorded in 320x240 and videos recorded in 640x480 have a look at the following videos.

These videos were made with a Canon A40 in 320x240:
Crawl Movie 1
Crawl Movie 2
Butterfly Movie 1
Butterfly Movie 2

These videos were made with my IXUS 500 in 640x480:
Crawl Movie 3
Butterfly Movie 3
Movie of swimming competition 1
Movie of swimming competition 2

The Videos in 640x480 are limited to 30 seconds. But I don't think this is a real limitation. If you record short scenes 30 seconds is plenty. Longer scenes get boring. Moreover the camera is nearly instantly ready for the next clip, which I find is very surprising.
There are three modes for video, but I think the 640x480 is the best:

Resolution	Frame rate	Max Duration
640x480	10 FPS	30 sec
320x240	15 FPS	180 sec
160x120	15 FPS	180 sec

A Movie with maximum duration takes about 18 MB, which is probably the size of the internal buffer. So if you want to make a lot of movies, you need a big CF-Card. I bought a 1 GB card, which gives me about 700 pictures or 28 minutes full resolution video.

Nice Features:

The camera has some nice features my old IXUS (and some other cameras) don't have:

1. Orientation Sensor
I love this useful little feature. I never have to correct the orientation of several hundred pictures manually again.

2. Ten steps replay zoom
The replay zoom offers ten zoom-steps to let you check every pixel of a picture on the display of the camera. I use this frequently and find it very useful. You can even read a entire newspaper page on the camera display with the replay zoom.

3. Long time exposure mode
This mode is very nice to do some "special effects" or make cool pictures in dark areas. Have a look at this series to see what you can do. I like this mode very much and use it frequently.

4. Themes
The camera offers Themes: You can customize a sound and a picture for many situations. I like to use a shutter sound of an old camera and a very funny sound for the self timer to make the people laugh. But most of the time I disable all sounds and custom background pictures.

5. Audio memo
You can record a short audio memo for a picture. I thought it would be very useful, but I haven't used it up to now.

6. Battery performance
This isn't a real feature, but it is worth mentioning: The battery performance is highly improved compared to my old IXUS. I use my old battery packs, which shows that the camera was modified and not the battery packs. Recently I made 100 pictures at daylight. With the same battery pack I made another 120 pictures with flash at a party. At the end of the party there wasn't even a low battery warning. I find this amazing.

Pros:

1. Light and compact
87 mm x 57 mm x 28 mm and about 185 g. This is very small.

2. Very nice body
The quality of the body is very high. The new alloy which was used for the body makes a very good impression on me.

3. Can use compact flash cards
I think compact flash cards are the best medium. The are cheap and very common. You can also exchange cards with many other devices. But you can only use CF type 1 cards. So you cannot use a microdrive.

4. Many cool features
The camera has a lot of cool features. Some are mentioned above, but there are even more:
There is a continous shoot mode with 2,2 FPS and about 12 images in a sequence. You can select ISO speed or adjust white balance manually. The camera has a very bright auto focus assist beam, which can be used for targeting. You can turn the auto focus assist beam off to make "surprise pictures". To conserve card space you can cut videos on the camera and remove uninteresting parts.

Cons:

To be honest: the camera is not perfect. There are some minor drawbacks you should know:

1. No manual exposure modes
Except from the long time exposure mode you have no manual exposure modes on the camera. This is no real problem for me. I wouldn't use these modes very often. The automatic modes have many options to get nearly every result you would achieve manually.

2. Not perfect video mode
The video recording mode of the camera is very good, but not perfect. The best mode is limited to 30 seconds and uses only 10 FPS. This is quite ok, but there are cameras with can record at 30 FPS with no time limit. The Sony DSC-W1 can do this for example. But it is 40% bigger and heavier and uses memory sticks, which I don't like.

3. Not the shortest shutter lag
The shutter lag was improved compared to my old IXUS, but not very much. In average it is still one second. There are some tricks to live with this, but there are also cameras, which are faster. I can live very well with the delay. Most of the time is consumed for the focusing. If you press the shutter half way you can "store" the focus and reduce the lag close to zero.

Conclusion:

I think the IXUS 500 is the one of the best compact cameras available today. It has many very nice features and only minor drawbacks. I can recommend this one to everyone who is looking for a small camera.