Sound quality of S230/IXUS v3 movie clips

[digiloo]

I bougth my first digicam - Ixus V3 - for christmas. I made some test videoclips while my children were singing christmas songs. The video quality was sufficient for this type of camera, but the sound quality was poor. For example the pronounced 'S'-letters had distorsion like in 'long distance phonecalls' some decades back. However, the voice of the photographer ( me behind the camera ) was recorded sufficient. The children were positioned 2meters in front of the camera.

Changing video resolution had no improve on sound - of course. I played the results with Camera/TV interface, MPEG2 on PC and also burned on CD-Rom (using VideoCD format, to play it on DVD player), all having the same poor sound quality.

I will have more tests but like to hear others experience on videoclip sound quality. I am not expecting true videocamera sound, but at least 'good GSM phone'-like quality. If you have time, please test video audio quality with your Ixus V3 / S230 having a similar scenario that I just introduced. I noticed that Steve had some MPEG's made for this forum, but they had little sound or just background noice.

Otherwise IXUS V3 is just cute and handy. I took even some pictures in low temperatures (-20degrees celcius) without problems. The rather poor sound quality does not make me unhappy in general for this cam. Have to look for much larger CF-card to store videoclips. The included 16MB-card is far too small for videoclips.

[rimbo]

Digiloo,

I don't own an Ixus, but the sound is recorded in mono aural. Which is single channel and the microphone can only pick up sound quite near to it. The sound quality is so low because of file size. It is intended only to go along with emails and hence the need to keep file sizes small.

Rimbo

[digiloo]

Yes Rimbo, I new it was mono. But still I was expecting somewhat better audio. Now when few days have passed I understand that this quality is what you really can get with these type of cameras. That was also the official answer from local Canon customer support, when I sent them a demo videoclip. Well, I intend to take videoclips anyway and bought a 128 SANDISK ultra CF for this purpose, although max 30sec clip is maximum (640x480resolution) per clip.