Canon Digital IXUS 960 IS > Reviews > The best compact digital camera available?

Author's product rating:   

Picture Quality	Excellent
Range & Quality of Features	Excellent
Ease of Use	Easy
Overall Look & Design	Excellent
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Image quality; features features features; titanium body; fast startup time
Disadvantages:	3 . 7 Optical Zoom is lacking; Competition cameras can shoot more FPS

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This is the second IXUS camera that I have owned. I bought my first IXUS on recommendation from a friend who had recently purchased one and bought my second IXUS based on my own personal experience with the IXUS camera's - they are outstanding!

Advantages:

The images produced by the camera are very sharp and the focus is always very accurate in relation to other compact digital camera's. I have compared images taken from this camera to the images taken by my friends who have a host of different digital compact camera's and nothing comes close to matching the image quality of the picture taken using this camera and these are not only my comments everyone agrees with me and have vowed to buy Canon IXUS Camera's next time around - even viewing the image at 100% the images are sharp and clear of noise all the way up to ISO 400 (ISO 800 and above show noise)

The video capabilities also impress me although there is nothing that seperates Canon from the comptition in this category - you can shoot video at 1024X768 at 15fps or 640X480 at 30fps along with some other lower resolution options

The camera also has some very nice features such as:

Stitch-assist which allows you to take panoramic photographs very easily by displaying your previous image as an overlay to the one you are about to take so you can light up your panoramic shots on the go making post-processing that much easier

Colour accent which allow you to make an entire photograph black and white except for the chosen colour - house of fun to be had with this

Face detection which works suprsingly well - I was sceptical about this feature until the I tested it out - it actually works amazingly well and can detect many faces in a photo

An interesting features which makes a lot of sense is the camera's ability to take photographs at a lower resolution (nobody actually needs 12MP) by cropping the image on the senor - this in effect gives you additional "zoom" without compromising on image quality - the same could be acheived by cropping the photo on your computer after you had taken the photo but a lot of people dont have the time to do this - this is a great feature (called Digital Tele-Converter and Safety Zoom for those interested)

The camera body is made of titanium which is stronger and lighter than steel - the camera is beautifull to look at and feels good in your hand; the quality of the product is obvious and as such I would still consider it reasonable value for money

The Camera is also very quick at starting up; from the moment you press the power button the camera is ready to take a picture almost instantaneously - its slower at shutting down but this doesnt matter so much

Disadvantages:

3.7X Optical zoom is a little lacking - especially compared to the offerings from the Panasonic Lumix range - consider waiting for the Canon IXUS 970 IS due in March

Competing cameras can shoot faster - i.e more pictures in same elapsed time than the canon IXUS series