Canon IXUS 210

Full Review

After the IXUS 200 IS, the IXUS 210 is another touchscreen compact digital camera from Canon that comes with more megapixels and fewer physical controls. From its wide angle lens to the large touchscreen with a simple interface, this IXUS is here to rival cameras from Sony’s Cyber-shot T-series and Samsung’s ST series.

Design
The Canon IXUS 210 is a sturdy compact camera, thanks to the metallic front with curved edges that blend into its dark plastic body. Build quality is good and the frost metallic finish enabled a good grip and is not vulnerable to scratches. We received the silver colored version and there are two other options as well - black and pink. The back of the IXUS 210 is devoid of any buttons and it houses just the large 3.5-inch touchscreen with a thin plastic strip on the right that serves as a thumbrest - this makes the camera look like a touchscreen phone when facing the LCD screen. This massive screen packs 460k colors which looks crisp and screen visibility outdoors is also good.

When I compared with its closest rival, the Sony TX7 , the colors looked more natural with a slight hint of blue while the colors on the Sony TX7 had a reddish tinge.

The camera is not the lightest compact at 160g, mainly due to its half-metallic body, but its dimension of 99.3 x 55.7 x 22.0mm is still pocket-able and convenient to carry. The flash is located on the upper left which unfortunately meant that it was easy to block with fingers while shooting with both hands gripping the camera. The button placements on the top, especially for the playback and power functions, are a bit cramped, on top of that, their flushed-in design made them hard to feel at times.

The large 3.5-inch touchscreen is driven by a beautiful interface.  The top buttons are a bit cramped and hard to feel.

The screen has 16:9 aspect ratio which leaves two vertical black strips on both sides when the camera is on. The touchscreen interface is simple and clearly laid out. If you’ve used Canon cameras before, you will feel right at home. The Canon IXUS 210 also has options to arrange icons based on your likings. Most of the settings like image size, white balance, exposure, colors, etc are accessible via the onscreen function button while more options can be accessed via the menu button on the screen. Apart from the usual A/V port, the IXUS 210 also provides a mini HDMI port, allowing you to hook it up directly with an HDTV or any display that takes HDMI input.

Overall, the design, build quality and interface does not suffer from any major issues, the IXUS 210 is a fairly easy to use camera with excellent build quality just like its predecessor, the Canon IXUS 200.

Features
The Canon IXUS has a 14.1MP CCD sensor with 5x optical zoom lens that has a focal length of 24mm at its widest and can reach till 120mm at its tele end. The IXUS 210 does not have the "IS" attached to its name but it certainly does offer image stabilization. With image stabilization becoming more of a norm for almost all digital cameras, maybe Canon chose not to highlight it. The camera does not have either an electronic nor an optical view-finder, so most of the composition and playback is done via its large 3.5-inch touchscreen at the back. This does affect the battery life of the unit as being constantly on drains the charge quicker. The camera supports HD (720p) video recording as well. Maximum video resolution that can be recorded is 1280x 720 pixels at 30fps with mono audio and it is saved in MOV format using H.264 codec. The other recording options available are 640x480 (VGA) and 320x240 (QVGA). Colors, white balance and focus range are settings available for video. One downer apart from mono audio recording is the lack of optical zoom while recording video.

The camera can be operated in three modes –movie, program and auto. In the auto mode the camera detects the scene and determines the best setting based on 22 pre-defined shooting situations. Switching to the "program" mode gives options to change settings like ISO (80/100/200/400/800/1600), focus range,  drive mode, metering, colors, white balance, image size and compression rate. The IXUS 210 offers a very unique and useful "touch to focus" feature which allows users to focus on any part of the frame by touching the screen and highlighting it while composing the shot. Canon also has added two new preset modes, the miniature effect and fish-eye effect. The IXUS 210 (like other cameras from the IXUS range) comes with a Digic 4 processor for snappy image processing and improved noise reduction when using high ISO settings. 

Performance
When it comes to shooting performance, the IXUS 210 is quite firmly in the middle of the road. Start-up time for its first shot was just 1.2 seconds which is quick. Shot to shot performance was slow at around 3.7 seconds while it took more than 4 seconds with flash. Shutter lag is satisfactory at 0.1 to 0.2 seconds with pre-focus and 0.4 to 0.5 second without pre-focus which is average. Its burst speed also is not so impressive at 0.7fps which made the IXUS 210 an unfavourable choice to capture sports events or for that matter, kids’ moments. Face detection worked well, the touch focus feature was fun to use and focus lock with tracking feature did an impressive job. The touchscreen responded pretty well and it does not hold you back from regular functioning.

The 24mm wide angle lens on the IXUS 210 is a bonus, allowing you to capture more indoors as well as outdoors. But, like in case with many wide angle lenses, the shots take by the IXUS 210 exhibited visible barrel distortion in wide angle shots. We also observed some softness in corners when shooting at telephoto end. The lens did a good job of focusing quickly even in low light conditions though.

Color reproduction is good however images look a bit soft especially in low light.

The IXUS 210 does well in the color reproduction department; the colors were well saturated as long as there was sufficient light. Detail levels from our test shot results were satisfactory and its performance in low-light as well as high contrast areas was acceptable for a compact camera.

Outdoor images showed vivid colors with good details.

Macro shot came out well but low light shots including the night shot above ( right) lacked details and noise presence is high.

Details on darker areas could have been better  ( above image)       Using the new Fish-eye mode

When I compared the IXUS with its closest rival, the Sony TX7 , the colors on the IXUS 210 looked more natural with a slight hint of blue while the colors on the Sony TX7 had a reddish tinge. However, overall sharpness or details weren't as good as the Cybershot TX7 from Sony.

ISO80                                 ISO100                                 ISO200

ISO400                                ISO800                                 ISO1600

We were able to get acceptable results till ISO 200, after which noise creeps in considerably. Its optical image stabilization is quite effective and is very useful while shooting at full zoom or in low light. Flash performed well up to the rated 11ft and images had good exposure with slight hint of noise in areas which were out of focus.

The Canon IXUS 210 recorded 720p HD videos with rich colors and acceptable details. Noise presence in low light was more than average though and unfortunately, optical zoom is not available in video mode. Its mono microphone picked up decent quality audio. The overall video capture quality is much better than the standard VGA quality but we would rate the video capture performance of the Sony Cybershot TX7 better, since it has better noise control, higer resolution (1080p) and offers stereo voice recording.

The full battery charge let us shoot around 160 shots with a few minutes of HD video recording  and the large 3.5-inch touchscreen surely is one main reason behind this average battery life.

Bottom Line

The Canon IXUS 210 is an easy to use compact camera with a large touchscreen which offered a neat interface. Its wide angle lens is impressive, so is the image quality under good light condition; however its average shot to shot performance and low light performance made it just an above average product. For its price tag of Rs. 21,995, we’d suggest the snappier Sony Cybershot-TX7 for its better low light shooting capability and video quality.