Canon PowerShot G9 12-megapixel digital camera

Canon's PowerShot G9 shoots still photos at a maximum resolution of 12.1 megapixels. That results in huge file sizes. At the best quality you are looking at about 5MB per file, sometimes more, sometimes less. Shooting at that quality gives you the potential for getting prints at up to A2 size: large enough for you to make posters from your photos.

You can, of course, scale things down in several increments, to 640 x 480 if that's what you want. And you can scale up too, with the camera capable of shooting uncompressed RAW format files.

Video footage comes in at a maximum of 1,024 x 768 pixels and 15 frames per second, or 640 x 480 and 30 frames per second. At these ratings and again at best quality you'll need about 2MB of storage for a second of footage.

Fortunately the camera supports SDHC so you can use SD memory cards with capacities over 2GB. We used a 4GB card in our test camera. You might have a problem getting prints into your permanent storage device of choice though, as older card readers may not support SDHC cards. A USB card adaptor solves the problem, but is a bit of a fiddle.

This is no pocket camera in any sense of the word. It measures 106.4 x 71.9 x 42.5mm and weighs 320g. The metal body provides plenty of protection, but you aren't going to be able to shove this camera in your top pocket on a whim.

The range of controls looks fiddly at first, but isn't too difficult to get used to. An ISO settings wheel is on the top left of the casing, with a wheel for setting the shooting mode on the top right. There are lots of presets, as well as full manual settings and one that lets you fiddle with the shutter speed while setting the aperture automatically (shutter priority) and another that reverses that option (aperture priority).

Meanwhile, on the back of the camera, the main controller is a pad with a central button surrounded by a D-pad of four buttons and outside that a wheel. This combination lets you get at most of the manual settings. There is an optical viewfinder, but frankly the 3-inch TFT screen is so superb that during testing we never bothered with the viewfinder at all.

There are more features here than you can shake a stick at, and the 6x optical zoom is just the start. To give two examples: there are preset modes for Portrait, Landscape, Night Scene, Sports, Night Snapshot, Kids & Pets, Indoor, Foliage, Snow, Beach, Fireworks, Aquarium and Underwater shots.

Meanwhile a set of effects under the My Colors heading runs to Vivid, Neutral, Sepia, Black & White, Positive Film, Lighter Skin Tone, Darker Skin Tone, Vivid Blue, Vivid Green, Vivid Red and Custom Color. These are really easy to set and view on the screen before you take photos.(itreviews.co.uk)