I've sort of been wanting to upgrade my digicam and sort been wanting to play around with shooting video but neither desire was terribly serious. That said, both those things would be nice for a trip I have coming up in July so I decided to use that as an excuse to get the new Powershot TX1 "hybrid" camera. I'll state up front that I'm going to sound like I'm coming down hard on this camera. It's not a bad product. It's just that for what it costs and Canon's semi-flagship billing, a lot of people are probably expecting more.

My first impression is that this thing is a lot smaller than I thought it would be. It's just barely bigger than my S410. I guess I was expecting it to be larger due to the vertical "pistol grip" nature of it's design. And herein lies this camera's biggest problem. It's an ergonomic mess compared to all the other canon S, A, and SD series cameras. If your hands are sized any larger than a 10 year old, you can pretty much guarantee you'll have to put your fingers at awkward or slightly uncomfortable positions. Don't get me wrong, the controls themselves are useable and laid out in a fairly logical manner. It's just that the nature of this camera's design, combined with it's tiny size, just makes for unpleasant ergonomics. The design/size combo also results in an LCD screen that's miniscule by today's standards. I'd be willing to bet that most people would have been happier if the entire camera was "scaled-up" by 10-15%.

Other drawbacks are that the battery compartment door is very flimsy and feels like it could get broken off with one light hit in the wrong direction. Also, the lanyard attachment loop that protrudes from the front of the camera is just irritating. It makes the camera's overall shape non-rectangular so you can't put it in any sort of form-fitting sleeve case. It's probably intended to aid in positioning your fingers but it doesn't help you actually grip the camera and you're obviously not going to drop the camera upward through your hand.

As for image quality, the weather around here has been moderate to heavy overcast every time I've tried to shoot so I can't make any firm judgments yet. Some of the shots I have managed can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/billiam...144971/detail/

If you look at this set, you'll see both positives and negatives. The shot of the window shutter shows a pretty respectable amount of dynamic range for a digicam. The shots of the stone wall also look really clean for ISO 400 on a digicam. On down side, look at the shot of the sky. It has a ridiculous amount of noise for ISO 100 and a fast shutter speed. I don't know if the exposure compensation I used did that or what. I can't imagine why it would since it was a minus value.

Now for my previous criticisms, the video this camera shoots is great! Is it as good as a dedicated video camera? No, of course not. For what this little camera is though, I think the video quality is very good. I'm by no means an aficionado of video from hybrid cameras or digicams but I think I can safely say the TX1 has trumped everything else that's out there where video is concerned. Below are a couple of samples I shot. My hosting company is sort of slow lately so be patient. The first one was shot hand held and zoomed in between 1/3 and 1/2 way. As you can see, the IS works pretty well. The second clip was shot on a tripod. The sound quality for the videos is also pretty good. In case you're wondering, that's traffic and an A/C unit you're hearing in the two clips.

http://www.luminousmatters.com/misc-...o/MVI_0040.avi (18 MB)
http://www.luminousmatters.com/misc-...o/MVI_0050.avi (29 MB)

So would I buy it again? Yes. Would I buy it if I didn't have the trip coming up? Probably not. Overall, I think the TX1 is a good product that fulfills the role of a "hybrid camera" quite well. The hybrid camera segment itself though is in its infancy and the TX1, although the leader in this segment, shows that things are in there formative stages.

 

The video looked good and was hit or miss with the pictures. The colors with the turtle was really nice. The rain was clear, I was waiting for a pretty women in a sundress to come running into the scene of that one. Everything I've read about this said it is a very poor design. Many makers are on this track, it's only a matter of time when they get it somewhat right. But there will still be a need for both.

Sony tried this with there Cybershot M1 and M2 and bowed out.

Thanks for the info. Be sure to post pic's of the trip.

 

I thought you were referring to a TS-E lens not a TX-1 when you dropped the hint in the other thread.

I'll take back the Mr. Scheimpflug name that I gave you then.

 

What are the setting you used to shoot the video?

I have been interested in this camera for my fiance since I first read about it back in December. I am big fan of the Canon S/SD series. And she has been wanting a video camera...but I hate consumer video cameras and I know she will not use it THAT much. So, I figured a small P&S to replace her current SD400 with video capable of 720p would be good enough for her.

 

I knew what you meant in the other thread. I thought I'd let it be a (significantly less expensive) surprise. I've been called worse BTW.

Siddig, the only setting I changed for the videos was the white balance. I had it set on "cloudy" for the turtle and "sunny" for the backlit rain.

 

Just curious because the video appears to be 1.33:1.....where as if it was 720p it should have been native 1.78:1. I saw the turtle clip and it looked pretty decent. The real test is seeing the image on a HD television.

 

Forgot the other settings

Both clips were shot at the 640x480/30fps setting. The 1280x720/30fps setting looks pretty damn good too. The thing is, I can really only view those clips on my Mac. I don't have access to an HDTV and on my older Windows machine, the large resolution of the video combined with the mJPEG codec results in playback that's only about 15-20 fps. I haven't bothered to try the "long play" settings at either resolution.

 

Thank you My only other question is what size card are you using? 2gb? and what is the length of time you can record for in HD on the card?

 

I'm using an 8GB Kingston SDHC class 6 card. I've normally never been a fan of Kingston stuff, but this particular card seemed to be universally praised among the handful of TX1 posts I found. I figured better safe than sorry so I went with it.

At 648x480/30 a formatted card shows a capacity of 62 minutes. At 1280x720/30 it goes down to 28 minutes. For continuous video shooting, you'll be limited by the 4GB maximum file size of the FAT32 file system.

If you haven't seen it already, you may want to check out:
http://powershot-tx1.blogspot.com/

 

geebus 14 minutes of video in a 4gb file