Canon Ixus 1000 HS review

Squeezing a 10x zoom lens into a camera this slim is no mean feat but Canon has done so without too much compromise. Photos lacked the biting detail that some cameras manage, but we’d only envisage that being an issue when heavily cropping the results. Chromatic aberrations were visible towards the edges of photos, though, resulting in a slight loss of detail and halos around high-contrast lines (see below). Automatic exposures were nearly always on the mark, both in terms of image brightness and picking the best balance of shutter and ISO speeds. Skin tones sometimes came out a little warm but the effect was fairly flattering.

As usual, the main limitation of the 1000 HS’s photos was noise. There was some evidence of it in brightly lit shots at the base ISO 125. As the ISO speed increased, digital processing blurred details and reduced the contrast in an effort to hide the rising noise. However, this camera still produced photos worth printing at ISO speeds up to 1600, which we can’t say about any other compact-shaped ultra-zoom camera. With most other issues being largely equal, the 1000 HS’s low noise puts it ahead of its competitors for image quality.

Another strength of this CMOS sensor is fast performance. According to Canon, continuous shooting is at “up to 3.7fps”, and sure enough, the camera hit that speed when shooting in very bright conditions with a 1/1,000s shutter speed. A 1/125s shutter slowed it down to 2.6fps, but that’s still a great result, and good news for action or wildlife photography. The camera was relatively pedestrian in normal use, though, taking four seconds to switch on and shoot, and 2.6 seconds between shots.

The fast sensor also captures slow motion video, recording at 240fps for 1/8th-speed playback at 30fps. It’s great fun, but the 320×240-pixel resolution means these clips aren’t as impressive as the VGA slow-motion clips from various Casio cameras and the Fujifilm HS10.