Canon PowerShot A1100 IS review

The Canon A1100 IS has been released with its compact partner, the A2100 IS - both of which feature a high 12.1-megapixels, but the A1100 IS hasn't come in cheap, breaking the £200 mark.

One of the main features of Canon’s new A1100IS camera is an Easy Auto mode, which helpfully detects what type of scene you're shooting. It's down to Canon's new Scene Detection Technology and it works completely automatically. If you're wondering, like us, how it differs from normal Auto mode, all the controls apart from the Flash are not available. You can turn the Flash to either Auto, or Off, but the menus aren't accessible, and the only other adjustable feature is the optical zoom. Easy mode is the quickest setting to use, as you don't have to worry about anything, especially if the Flash is set to Auto. You really are putting all trust in the camera, and even the quality setting is decided for you. Impressively, when the camera's under the control of the Scene Detection Technology it thinks about the shot's brightness, contrast, distance and hue all in one. But not being allowed into the menu is unusual. 

There are 14 scene modes, and the main ones, such as Portrait and Landscape modes, are found on the Mode Dial. The others are reached through the Function Set button on the back on the camera. The camera's menus are very simple and kept short and concise. With the help of Mode Dial you won't find yourself going in and out of it searching for exposure settings. The menu does hold a feature that can go easily undiscovered. The i-Contrast adjustment can be only be found in the menu when shooting in P mode, and is not available in any other mode. With the  i-Contrast set to Auto, the camera boosts an image's dynamic range producing punchier results than usual. 

All the manual controls are in P mode, and unfortunately there's no dedicated manual mode for experimenting with the shutter speeds and aperture settings. In P mode you have the option to change the My Colors set-up. My Colors is the most creative feature of the camera, which contains effects for doing Black and Whites, Vivid, and it also a Custom Color mode for changing saturation, contrast and sharpness to your liking.

The A1100 IS has a 2.5 inch LCD screen, which you'd hope would be bigger for it a camera of it's price tag. Its body is large enough for a 2.7 or a 3 inch LCD, but as many of the Canon compacts, the smaller LCD screen means there's room for an optical viewfinder. The camera uses 2xAA batteries, which contribute to most of its weight. Its battery compartment bulges out, and makes for a good finger grip, but Canon has played it safe on the design side. You would expect a less plastic feeling camera for the price,  though it comes in a blue, pink or silver casing.

The A1100 IS has a DIGIC 4 processor behind its 4x optical zoom lens. With this top of the range technology, purple fringing is kept to a minimum. It does slightly appear in the areas where highlights directly clash with shadows, but we've seen a lot worse chromatic aberration on other compacts of a similar price. So technology-wise the A1100 IS shapes up to deliver the goods; this is seems to be its saving grace. 

Keeping the ISO doors wide open, the A1100 IS ranges from ISO 80 to 1600. One of the camera's Scene Modes pushes this to ISO 3200, which from our tests is a definite no-go area. Noise is still very ugly at ISO 1600, and only becomes acceptable when you reach ISO 200. We recommend sticking primarily to ISO 80, at all times by using the P shooting mode. It also means you can print to poster sizes with as little noise as possible.

Our overall thoughts of the A1100 IS are that its over-priced and under-equipped, with many of the features deserving to be bigger and better for the price. We think you'll pay for the name more than what the camera has to offer, but the images are of high standard with the help of Canon's decent DIGIC 4 processor.