Canon PowerShot SD300 / IXUS 40 Digital Camera

Launched in September 2004 the stainless steel Canon Ixus 40 is a tiny simple to use camera which has proved very popular with myself and my family. It is one of the smallest cameras in it's class. We have now owned the camera for nearly two years. I wanted a small reliable digital camera that would easily fit in my pocket to take with me almost everywhere and be ready to take a picture in a few seconds. This camera lets me do that.

The Canon IXUS 40 is a 4 megapixel ultra slim digital camera with movie mode. It has a good quality sleek metal body that looks good and feels good to handle. It is strong and tough, it has survived many hard impacts without effect. So small I don't have any problem to carry it with me everywhere so I can capture memories. A large 2inch LCD screen with ScratchGard ScreenProtect that makes it much easier to see your composition and review your photos. It has an optical zoom that that is probably one of the biggest for such a small camera design using a 3X optical zoom. The zoom switch is conveniently situated with the shutter button for ease of use and comfort.

This Canon would normaly be considered a point and shoot camera but after using you quickly discover it is actually geared towards beginners and experienced photographers to take good, clean and quick shots. This is not a professional camera for professional shots. It is great for quick and casual photography.

With typical Canon colour quality, the images are as good as you can get from a compact camera. It has very good presets and modes for indoor, outdoor, landscapes, portraits etc. Macro mode and variable exposure for up to 15 seconds long. Some great image options are there if you want them, "vivid" makes the colours brighter and "B+W or Sepia" effects can be done from within the camera. If you want to tweak things to be a bit more professional then anything you want to tweak can be.

The flash is very effective but does cause red eye a little more easily than some other cameras and can be a little too bright with close up items but with a little care using flash or tweaking the exposure in close up situations this can be avoided.

Considering this is a camera and not a camcorder the video quality is excellent and stored as MJPEG which is higher quality format than other cameras have using the MPEG codecs. It can do 640x480@30fps and 320x240@60fps as well as others, recording motion with good sound untill it fills your memory card.

The camera came with a feeble 16MB SD card so I recommend upgrading to a larger SD card if you plan to take quite a few photographs. A SanDisk or Lexar 1GB SD card is a good all round option for quality and storage capacity.

The included software is ok and will suit most needs. It will catalogue your photos and stitch together any panoramic shots that are taken with the panoramic mode.

The battery is about the size of a match box and give a long period of use from one charge. I would have found the camera charging facility a little better if it could be charged from within the camera but it has to be removed and charged in a seperate unit that comes with the camera.

So in conclusion. An excellent camera. Convenient size, sleek attractive tough metal body, takes great photos and has a great movie mode. Altogether a great cost effective digital camera.