Canon Digital IXUS 960 IS high quality 12-megapixel digital compact

It's becoming increasingly difficult, when buying compact digital cameras off the shelf, to tell one from another, as the standard rectangular silver casing seems to be the norm for the majority of the market. It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise, when removing the packaging from the latest Canon Digital IXUS, to see a more 'battleship grey' tone of titanium and a sexy, indented curve to the front and sides.

It feels solid and comfortable to hold, too, measuring 90 x 57 x 26mm and weighing 165g. One slight annoyance, however, was the frequent appearance of fingerprints on the circular surround encompassing the lens on the front. A side panel houses the A/V out and USB 2.0 connection points, but it's awkward to open and keep open.

The control layout is what we've come to expect from the IXUS range, with the zoom, shutter and on/off buttons on the top, and camera mode, function set, display, menu, playback and print controls on the back. The function set employs a touch-control dial which enables accurate refinement of your settings without moving your thumb around.

Viewing is via the 2.5-inch 'PureColor' LCD which uses 260,000 pixels and is protected against damage and strong sunlight thanks to the anti-glare, scratch-resistant coating. As is generally known, you don't need vast amounts of sensor pixels to take a good photo but the 960 IS has 12.1-megapixels anyway, which ensures that even significant enlargements are pretty much guaranteed to keep a similar degree of sharpness to the original.

The 3.7x zoom lens is allied with Canon's trademark optical image stabilizer technology, ISO 1600 and the Auto ISO Shift option, to make it as easy as possible to counteract blurring. The DIGIC III processor is another standard feature which has consistently produced authentic, crisp images of high quality and at high speeds. Face detection is also in place to automatically sort out focus, exposure and flash settings before taking the shot and to correct red-eye after it's captured.

There are 18 shooting modes to choose from, ranging from Night, Kids & Pets, Indoor and Foliage to Snow, Beach, Fireworks and Underwater (for which you'll need a separate protective cover). In addition there are six movie modes which include Long Play for VGA at 30fps, High Resolution (at 1,024), Compact and Time Lapse.

Speed of set-up is no more than two seconds from the switch-on, and focusing time is also about average, although it sometimes takes a couple of attempts for the face detection system to kick in. The end results, though, for zoomed images and still shots in general, are uniformly top of the class for a compact digital.(itreviews.co.uk)