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Good-looking shooter

CANON USUALLY makes pretty stylish cameras but few as good-looking as the IXUS 310 HS. It’s a compact digital camera with very good looks available in four colours: silver, brown, gold and pink. Don’t be fooled by the good looks though, the 310 is also a very capable shooter.

A large 3.2-inch LCD panel covers almost all of the rear of the 310 and Canon has almost completely done away with physical buttons. That makes sense since it’s a touchscreen so be prepared to control the camera that way. Although touch interfaces on cameras have come a long way they’re still not as fluid and intuitive as those of, let’s say, iOS, but Canon is getting close to it. Personally I still prefer to have a few dials and knobs on the outside to control but there’s no denying that touch means a sleeker camera.

Unusual for this class of cameras, the 310 has a 24mm wide angle lens with a fast f2.0 maximum aperture. In brief, you can capture more of a scene with the wide angle as well as shoot in lower light without getting blurry pictures. The faster aperture will also allow you to use a faster shutter speed in scenes that demand fast action. This combined with Canon’s DIGIC 4 image processor, makes the 310 take some excellent 12.1-megapixel photographs. If you’re into video there’s also full 1080 HD video recording with stereo sound.

For a bit of fun, there are several creative modes on the 310. What really stands out to me is the Movie Digest, which automatically captures four seconds of video when a still image is taken and then puts those clips together into a sort of diary of what happened that day.

Canon’s IXUS 310 HS is in the market now for Dh1,399. 


emiratesmac@gmail.com

Magnus Nystedt talks and writes about technology as much as he can. Follow him on Twitter as @mnystedt for the latest on consumer technology in the Middle East.

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