Canon IXUS 1000 HS

I've upgraded from the Canon IXUS 980IS to a Canon IXUS 1000 HS.

Since the "IXUS 1000" is a 10th anniversary device on the IXUS range, of which I've been a fan, I was expecting this model to be particularly good.

Unfortunately my experience with the Canon IXUS 1000 HS has been flawed, which I hope Canon will address in future.

Since it's longer than any other IXUS I've ever owned, there is no neat leather case that fits this device. I've asked Canon to no reply, about a case that can fix this. The support channel on their Website failed. :( So after-sales sucks. Update: I have found the model number DCC-1700 for the right fitting case. Seems to retail at 20GBP :(

The "super slow motion" video quality is very poor. :( It's probably related to the Image Stabilisation (IS).

I don't like the top slider. It feels fragile. I'm amazed they couldn't do without it, especially considering there is a dedicated video record button. When you are in the "video mode" if you press the shutter, it takes a picture which seems a little counter-intuitive to me.

The zoom is good, but since it's a compact, I really doubt I will use it as it's so hard to keep it steady in one's hand.

The videos it records are just gigantic. Can't I expect the camera to encode the videos to a sane size? The camera can't take videos longer than 10 minutes which is a little sucky.

I've yet to fully understand "FULL HD". So far the playback just seems big, yet when I hit the HD button on Youtube/Vimeo/BBC Iplayer, it just seems sharper. So there is some mis-match of expectations on my part.

Videos taken on my older IXUS 980IS had a helpful thumbnail. Unfortunately no thumbnail is created by the IXUS 1000 HS. :/

HD movies on the menu hint claims it is recording at 1920x1080, in reality it is recording at 1920x1088, which results in a whole host of ugly scaling problems when re-encoding from MOV. :(

I don't like having to press the power button to playback some pictures. On my previous camera, all I needed to do is press the "play button", now it's a 2 step process with the camera lens protruding. :( UPDATE: If you HOLD the play button, the camera does come online.

Also I find it gets in this strange playback mode and for the life of my I can't figure out howto reset the option to view pictures fullscreen!!

The battery life seems poorer than the previous model. The battery pack itself is a incompatible size to the previous model(s). :(

The build chassis doesn't feel very solid. It feels plasticky. Perhaps there is a better build version of this camera that has alluded me. I can't tell which models will be made to a better specification.

Wish there was RAW mode so I could try WebP.

Sometimes photos seem terribly unsharp which I have not noticed on my previous camera. :(

In other news I am trying to work out what sort of post-processing I need to do in order to put the videos up on http://video.natalian.org/. I've gone off ffmpeg2theora since it segfaults on these large MOVs doing a free() at the very end of re-encoding.

The IXUS 1000 HS FAQ is interesting if you managed to get there without the constant "Internal server errors" of Canon's poor Website.