The image above was taken with the Canon ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS. The lens was zoomed in slightly to give an equivalent vertical field of view to the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS. In Program auto mode the camera metered an exposure of 1/200 at f10. The original Superfine JPEG image size was 7.47MB. The crops are taken from the areas marked with red rectangles and presented here at 100%. Image stabilisation was disabled for these tripod-based tests and i-Contrast was left in the default off poition on both cameras.

Overall the ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS has produced a nice result, the exposure and white balance are spot on and the colours are bright and saturated. A wider aperture and faster shutter speed would have produced a better quality result though as at f10 diffraction will result in less clean edge detail than a wider aperture. The ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS has two aperture settings and generally uses the smaller one in bright outdoor conditions, only opening up indoors and in low light.

Turning to the crops, there’s a good level of detail, but some visible noise too. The HS suffix on the ELPH / IXUS range stands for High Sensitivity and highlights the low noise capabilities of their back-illuminated CMOS sensors, but even outdoors in bright light they’re not completely noise-free. Having said said that, there’s a world of a difference between these results and those from models in the PowerShot range which use a 16 Megapixel CCD sensor and are more prone to noise and processing artifacts.

The first crop actually shows a good deal of detail in the chapel and grassy foreground. Likewise the lighthouse is a clear and distinct column with well defined edges and the foreground roofs and window frames also showing a good level of detail. While there’s a definite textured look to these crops, it’s not intrusive and it doesn’t obscure fine detail. The third crop from the frame edge is a little softer and there’s slight colour fringing on the window frame. As you might expect, the final crop from the centre of the frame produces the best result with clean sharp edges and plenty of fine image detail.

The crops from the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS make for an interesting comparison with those from the ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS. You might think that with a 10 megapixel sensor the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS stands a good chance of producing better results than the 16.1 Megapixel ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS, but in fact the sensor in the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS has a total pixel count of 16.8 megapixels and is in all likelihood the same sensor as in the ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS. Only the central portion of the sensor is used, giving an effective count of 10.1 Megapixels.

What does this mean in practice? See my upcoming review of the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS for more details. As far as the quality of the crops is concerned you can tell pretty much at a glance that while the detail from the (effective) 10.1 Megapixel ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS is smaller, the quality is actually very similar. About the only other difference is that the ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS doesn’t suffer from chromatic aberration at the edge of the frame.

To see how these models compare at higher sensitivities check out my Canon ELPH 110 / IXUS 125 Noise results.

To compare noise levels under real-life conditions I shot this scene with the Canon ELPH 110 HS / IXUS 125 HS and the Canon ELPH 520 HS / IXUS 500 HS within a few moments of each other using their highest resolution Superfine JPEG mode at each of their ISO sensitivity settings.

The cameras were set to Program Auto exposure mode, the lenses were set to the same field of view and the ISO sensitivity was set manually.