Canon IXUS 310 HS

Intro, Features And Specs

The Canon IXUS 310 HS is the spiritual successor to Canon Powershot S95. Basically, Canon has done away with the physical controls and opted for a full touchscreen experience with the IXUS 310 HS. It boasts of superior night photography capabilities and Canon has also embedded a truckload of features in the camera. It is a bold move by Canon and read on to find out how the camera fares in our review and against competition from Panasonic Lumix DMC FX-78 and DSLR offerings from Canon and Nikon that are available at a little higher price point than the IXUS 310 HS.

I firmly believe that the IXUS 310 HS has a love it or hate it design.

Feature and Specs

The IXUS 310 HS has a 12.1 MP lens with 4.4x optical zoom which is average for a camera in this range. It has Canon’s proprietary HS system for low-light photography and it also has the latest DIGIC4 processor with integrated iSAPS which helps the camera in automatically choosing the right scene while shooting pictures. The 310 HS has a 3.2-inch LCD with a higher resolution of touchscreen (461,000-dots compared to 230,000) with five adjustable brightness levels similar to the other compact digital cameras offered by Canon.

The IXUS 310 HS has an ISO rating starting from ISO 100 right up to ISO 3200. The camera’s ultra wide f/2 optically stabilized wide angle (24mm to 120mm) lens is top-notch.

Apart from the Smart auto mode in which the camera chooses the scene settings on its own, the advanced users have a range of shooting modes at their disposal. There are a total of 24 modes apart from the program mode. The most interesting features are the Aperture Priority (Av) and Shutter Priority (Tv) modes. The others include Toy Camera effect mode and Handheld Night scene mode (allows you to take pictures in low light without a tripod). The Low-Light (lets you choose shutter speed), Miniature and Fisheye Effect modes, which we saw in the IXUS 300 HS and the 220 HS, is present along with the standard Canon scene modes like Color Accent, Color Swap, and Stitch Assist etc. In the High speed burst mode Canon claims the camera captures 8 shots per/sec at 3MP resolution. We shall test those claims in the latter part of the review.

The Canon IXUS 310 HS records 1080p HD video at 23fps with stereo audio recording and also features Super Slow Motion and iframe movie modes. In the super slow motion mode the camera records VGA (640X480) at 120fps and QVGA (320x240) at 240fps.

Apart from the miniUSB port for transferring images to your computer, Canon has also included HDMI support via mini HDMI port. The IXUS 310 HS supports SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC, MMCplus, HCMMCplus cards but does not have any internal memory which is disappointing.

The box contained an AV cable, battery charger, Software CD (with the software ZoomBrowser and Photostitch), a 2GB memory card and manual.