Canon TX1 First Look Review
posted in Photography, Canon TX1 |I’ve had the new Canon TX1 out of its box for all of an hour now so this is a very quick set of first impressions. When people see it their first reaction is that its a video camera. Its interesting that this form factor looks like video camera first and people are surprised that its a capable still-photo camera too.
First a couple of reactions about the form factor. This is a little bit of a disappointment. Because the camera is so small you only have room for about two fingers to hold it under the lens. The power button is in a weird spot on the side and much worse the trigger is in a weird spot on the top. To shoot still photos I need to hold it with what feels like a very unnatural grip. For shooting movies the controls feel a bit better since the record button is on the back right where your thumb would be and so is the wide angle/telephoto toggle.
Overall still photo quality seems good. Low light seems a bit better than my previous camera (Canon SD550) although still far from even acceptable. There is a special indoor mode that helped a bit more too. The test photos I took were much better in terms of reduced bluring- the image stabalization seems to be working really well (or maybe that is some placebo effect). I did have a problem using the zoom indoors with it not focusing correctly.
There is a new super-macro mode that lets you focus from 0-10cm. I took a couple of test shots with this and it is pretty damn awesome. Should be great for some of the flower and food photos that I like to take.
I shot a couple of test movies and the results looked pretty great. I bought a 8GB flash card for $60 from NewEgg but its the slow kind so in the HD mode I can only shoot about 30 seconds before it quits. Unlike the old camera it at least gives you a nice display of how close you are getting to running out of buffer.
At maximum quality settings I can get a bit more than 27 minutes of HD video onto one flash card and the bandwidth is high enough that as far as I can tell Windows Media Player couldn’t keep up with the 30fps on my laptop (Core Duo 2ghz). At least so far I tend to not shoot video for more than small clips so the size shouldn’t be an issue, although I do wonder if 32GB SDHC cards will be out soon.