The TX-1 is one of the few legitimately striking stills cameras we’ve seen in quite a while. Its form factor aside, the TX1’s claim to fame is its ability to capture 720p HD video.

Even though it bears the Powershot name, the TX-1’s closest relatives are from the Ixus family. This makes it more of a point and shoot camera than a true Powershot camera; which are rightly acknowledged as ‘The Portable Cameras For Real Men’.

For controlling most of the image settings, you have a green backlit power button and rotary mode dial control. These suit the TX1’s point and shoot style. There are more image settings available from the intuitive and sparse menu, which is controlled by a 5 way rocker switch positioned above the zoom rocker. Not only does it navigate the menu, it also provides quick access to the more crucial image settings such as ISO speed and flash modes.

In spite of the flash’s close proximity to the lens, very few of our photos were cursed with red eyes. Subjects wearing glasses at a distance of three to four metres away from the camera were more prone to red eyes than those without, but we were nonetheless impressed with both the red eye reduction and the autofocus settings.

It’s a beautiful machine to use. It’s weightier than it should be; which makes it feel solid and sturdy like a Bang and Olufsen remote control. Unlike a light camera, this weight keeps your hand steady; and the result is less movement in dark scenes. Even something as simple as reviewing photos on the 1.8” fold out LCD is a pleasure; as a fast and subtle fade blends pictures together as you flick through them. But enough of still images; let’s look at the video.

The TX-1 encodes footage with the MJPEG codec, which as the name implies is a video composed of a series of JPEG images. This means that there are no motion artefacts and the camera doesn’t chew through its battery when recording. However, a huge storage requirement balances out these plus on the other side of the scale.

In 1280 x 720 resolution (also known as 720p, which is technically a form of HD) the TX1 will burn through 2GB of memory every 7 minutes. You can drop the resolution to either 640 x 480 or 320 x 240 to gain some recording time, and each mode does come with a long-play option that will roughly double the recording time of the selected mode at the expense of bit depth. Either way, it makes video a little impractical unless you have storage to burn.

Although MJPEG has been used by many still cameras before, until new generation SDHC memory cards (which the TX1 supports) of 8 GB and above become available, this is not an alternative to a dedicated video camera. Even if you do have the right storage requirements, there is still a lot of digital noise viewable in darker scenes where it seems that gain has been added to the image. The microphones in the back of the viewfinder do an admirable job, but in spite of the undeniably impressive high resolution video, it still feels like watching a stills camera on video duty, albeit one that is doing a great job of it.

In this regard, the TX1 is a highly polished point and shoot stills camera with remarkable video capabilities requirements and a design that will turn heads. It may not offer as much control over the still images as a more advanced Powershot, but it’s not supposed to. We love it for its construction, good image quality and brute force approach to video, which will become less of an issue as SDHC memory capacity inevitably increases.

Even though we do love it, it does suffer from first generation syndrome; it’s about $100 too expensive, and comes bundled with a laughably inadequate 32MB SD card. However with so many other points in its favour, the discerning gadgeteer won’t care about these minor shortcomings.