Canon IXUS 50 digicam

Colourise your shots before you take them...

Published Wednesday 8th June 2005 14:21 GMT

Review Playing about with colours is something most of us do after we have transferred digital pictures from camera to computer. Now you can do it on your camera before you start shooting. Canon's IXUS 50 introduces a new usage mode, My Colors. The balance between red, green and blue can be altered, skin can be given pale or tanned effects and one colour can be highlighted with everything else rendered in black and white. Colours can also be swapped, writes Debbie Davies.

Canon IXUS 50 We put My Colors to the test on a bottle of tomato ketchup. With the camera in shooting mode, clicking the Function/Set button displays nine different modes: Auto, Manual, Digital Macro, Portrait, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Underwater and, lastly, My Colors. Selecting My Colors opens a sub-menu displayed along the bottom of the LCD screen with nine options. The first option, Positive Film, produces intense natural appearing colours like those obtained with positive film. There are two options for skin colour: Lighter Skin Tone and Darker Skin Tone. These worked well, colouring our subject's lily white skin with a light Mediterranean tan while leaving all the other colours in the shot true. Our favourite options were Color Accent and Color Swap. The first lets you transform an image into black and white but keep one colour true - like the red-coated girl in Schindler's List, or the blood in Sin City.

Color Swap lets you select a colour on the LCD screen and swap it for another one. The controls are very easy to use, so it takes seconds to swap red ketchup for white and then yellow and then green and see the results of your creative photography. If you're unsure about the effect you want then original images can be recorded at the same time as the My Color versions. My Colors also works in Movie Mode.

The IXUS 50 features another first: Canon's QuickBright function on the 2in LCD screen. The LCD is important because the viewfinder on this camera is grotty and difficult to use for anyone with a nose. Pressing the display button for over a second increases the light behind the LCD screen. Pressing it again restores the original setting. Canon claims that QuickBright improves visibility in glare or outdoor conditions. This was the case in our tests, but the improvement was so minimal as to make little difference. Sony has a better solution to washed out LCD screens in our view with its Clear Photo technology. Sony also gives more useful information than Canon on battery power and storage capacity. Canon's low battery indicator appears just before you run out of juice whereas Sony's indicator shows a full battery and then exactly how much power you are using.

We set our IXUS 50 to its lowest quality image setting because we were testing it with the tiny 16MB storage card that comes with the camera. The information it gave on how many shots we had left was quite inaccurate. When the indicator said we had room for 119 more shots, we were able to take a further 31 shots before the memory card was full. If you don't want to be caught out, buy a much bigger memory card and a second battery.

Verdict

_Aside from My Colors and QuickBright, the IXUS 50 is almost identical to Canon's IXUS 40. The new model adds a million more pixels - to 5mp, as its name hints - but this will make little difference to standard, 6 x 4 prints. However, at A3 it will give noticeably better results. __We checked prices on the two models for this review. At around £20 more than the 40, the IXUS 50 seems good value for such a versatile, high quality compact camera which looks as good today as when Canon launched the first IXUS camera nine years ago.

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Canon IXUS 50

Rating	80%

Pros	My Colors; good-looking, compact design.

Cons	LCD; viewfinder; bundled 16MB storage card.

Price	£319

More info	The Canon site