Home > Consumer Reviews > Canon Digital IXUS 55 Digital Camera [5MP, 3 x Optical Zoom]

I've had Canon Ixus 55 for half a year now. It's quite incredible what this little camera does. The pictures are crystal clear, the big display makes it easy to view them and re-take in case you are not satisfied with them.

The design is good and user friendly. The menu is easy to read and there are not many things that will make you ponder about what they mean. It's truly easy to use and gives a great result.

The wide array of modes, possibilities of adjusting exposure times, ISO, white balance, flash, red-eye reduction, and many more things, make this a smart gadget appropriate to use in most settings imaginabe - even under water, with appropriate casing!

For a truly comfortable use I suggest buying a second battery and at 512MB SD card. (I have 1G, but can never fill it up, although I take high quality poctures).

There are some minor details though, that I wish would be improved in the following models:

- the button to switch between view, play and record modes does not seem to fit into the rest of the design - although it is functioning properly, it seems that it is not of the same quality as the rest of the casing
- there is no indicator for the batery except a red battery sign when the battery is near empty. This is not a major thing, but some people like to know all the time.
- flash is a bit too powerful almost most of the time, but this is easy to fix with the exposure time adjustement.

All in all, this is an amaizing value for money and an excellent buy. It is a camera that fits in your pocket so you can take it with you wherever you go and capture the moments you'd otherwise forget. Highly recommended.

I was very pleased with the camera upon purchase but I thought it would be useful to give you guys an idea of how well it performs after 6 months use.

1. The camera starts to look very tatty very quickly picking up scratches to the metal - esk casing and buttons/switches loosing their coating all together. This is wear and tear even with using the case, which I bought separateley (the proper cannon case) which also turns this small nifty camera into a bulky item.

2.Switching betwwen camera/movie/view mode is now very difficult to do as the switch for this is now sticking on movie. very annoying.

3. only really produces good pictures on standard view. Try zooming and this camera has had it even on the optical zoom, but trying to digitally zoom is pointless - your pictures will not come out how you may have expected.

4.has started making a weird clunking noise when turning off and retracting the zoom lens.

5.does not perform well on night shots.

I wish I had read somthing like this before buying, it may have convinced me to go for a slighlty more expensive camera. Do not buy it thinking it is pro - ish just because it's a Cannon, it's nowhere near that, it is a fun, cheap camera that's great for taking shots on the spur of the moment and capturing some great memories reasonably well.

Others have summed this product up well, but I would just like to add a couple of things;

1) Actually, it does have shutter priority (Im soooo happy about this), in take picture mode, people just need to read the manual better! In take picture mode, go 'menu' then scroll down to 'long shutter', change to yes, then exit menu, and go func>manual settings mode (one of the first options), then go down ONE to exposure, and press menu to set how many seconds shutter is open...

2) This camera is mind blowing. I nearly bought a bigger more expensive one to get more features, but decided i had to get this because it's so small, so i actually can use it everyday... Imagine my joy when I recieve it, and find it has every feature/setting i could ever want! Im so happy.

WOW, super cool camera. It is so hard not to fall in love with it immediately. It looks great, the shiny metal body, and the large LCD display are great. Image quality is super almost in every setting, but of course much better for printing if you choose high setting. The interface is so easy to get use to and you can start taking photos almost after 90 minutes (time you need to charge the battery for the first time).
Video mode is superb, choose 30fbs, and you can see how great it is, but it takes a large memory store space. Anyway, i guess that would not be a problem if you buy an SD memory card, with high speed and capacity. I bought it from Amazon very recently, together with SD card and a leather case, still haven't got the case, but the camera and the card arrived and they are great.
This by far is the best camera i have bought, and it is a lot of fun to use, and you can carry it everywhere. You can also choose different settings for your photos, in addition to in-camera red eye reduction to make things even better.
If you are looking for a great camera, this is the one. Great price, amazing camera, and you do not need any more pixels unless you are planning to print your photos on large posters.
Do not hesitate,get one if you do not already have a digital camera or looking for a new one.

After spending quite a while mulling over which camera to purchase, I came across the Cannon Ixus 55. I didn't previously own a digital camera but wanted one that that would fulfil the following criteria. It had to be easy to use, would take high quality shots without me having to do much, could take movies and didn't cost the earth. You could say that that most cameras fit this criteria or that at this price it is a lot for a camera. But the Cannon 55 was one of only a few cameras that had fantastic feedback on Amazon. And rightly so. The battery charge time is 90 minutes meaning you are ready to go immeadiatly. The 5 million pixels is more that enough to print A4 size photos should you need. The simple menu function is easy to use. Functions include macro, night, snow, beach, fireworks, black and white, indoor and underwater (with water case). You can adjust the quality of the shot, going down to one million pixels and the sharpness of the image. Plus there are different flash and exposure settings. The photos I have taken so far have been indoors at both day and night and in cloudy settings outside, and the colour, quality and brightness have all been excellent. Because I was looking for good quality movies, I was concerned about a few reviews which said that the Cannon 55 was okay but nothing special. However, I have found the movies mode to be good as well. However, even on a 1Gb memory card you can only take eight minutes of high resolution film, as another reviewer pointed out. However by changing the frames per second setting you can increase this to 40 minutes and it is still very good quality. The one gripe I do have is having the complete user manual on cd and the useless 16 mb memory card you get with the camera.
While this review may for some state very obvious descriptions about digital cameras in general, for a first time buyer like myself, these 'obvious' descriptions are somethimes overlooked by reviewers. Lastly I would also say that you should trust Amazon reviews if they rate items high, it is as in this case, deserved.