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Canon Digital IXUS 60

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By Shams Tarek, CNET.com
Jul 17, 2006

A lot of cameras in the crowded and competitive digital point-and-shoot market are all flash and no substance. They add all sorts of extra gimmicks such as fancy slide shows and colorful borders that don't actually contribute to the cameras' pictures. Canon thumbs its nose at that design philosophy with the simple yet functional Digital IXUS 60, a 6-megapixel point-and-shoot camera that's light on features but heavy on image quality, performance, and usability. It's simply a great camera for anyone interested in just taking great-looking images.

Design
A midrange member of Canon's IXUS series of cameras, the Canon Digital IXUS 60 is small and light, weighing less than 170g. The matte-silver metal body, almost identical to the IXUS 65's, is compact enough to fit in a shirt pocket but solid enough to have a nice, dense, block-of-metal feel. If you want to spend an extra US$50 or so, the IXUS 65 is a carbon copy of the IXUS 60 but with a 3-inch LCD compared to the IXUS 60's 2.5-inch screen.

Like the camera itself, the Canon IXUS 60's control scheme is simple but functional. Most of the controls are on the back of the camera, next to the LCD. You control camera functions with a basic four-way-plus-Ok switch, with instant access to ISO, flash, macro, burst, and shutter settings. The back of the camera also holds a mode slider, as well as display, menu, and print buttons. The top side of the camera holds the shutter release, the zoom rocker, and a power button.

Features
The IXUS 60 sports a standard F2.8-to-F4.9, 3x zoom lens (35mm-to-105mm equivalent) and offers a basic feature set highlighted by a few notable capabilities. The 2.5-inch LCD is accompanied by an optical viewfinder, a rare combination in ultracompacts. The viewfinder is tiny but welcome, especially when battery power runs low. The camera has a handful of scene presets, plus a VGA movie mode with a QVGA 60fps setting for watching slow-motion clips.

Of course, Canon's innumerable image-adjustment parameters let you tinker with contrast, sharpness, saturation, and skin tone, as well as red, green and blue levels.

The IXUS 60 lacks certain features, such as built-in memory, image stabilization, manual exposure control, and a live histogram. These would have been handy, but they're not critical, and their absence hardly hurts the camera's appeal.

 
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