Canon Digital Ixus i7 Zoom review

The Ixus i7 exudes a refined elegance that suggests Canon has female shoppers in its sights.

We love the brown and gold colour scheme; it's also available in silver, pink or blue. It's one of the lightest and smallest cameras we've seen, but this means there's only room for a 2.4x zoom lens and a 1.8in screen. The lens's macro mode is disappointing, with a minimum focusing distance of 30cm.

There aren't many buttons on the back of the camera, with no dedicated control for zooming. The up and down navigation buttons act as zoom controls, but the down button also serves as the delete button. When we took a picture and then quickly zoomed out, the camera thought that we wanted to delete the previous picture.

With Canon's new Digic III processor included, performance is excellent, with a 1.5-second startup time, 1.7 seconds between shots and a 1.6fps continuous mode. Autofocus is fast, too, and benefits from face detection. Battery life is disappointing, though, especially considering that the small screen drains less power than 2in screens.

We struggled to reach a conclusion about the i7fs image quality, so the best we can say is that it's variable. It often produced sharp images, but unreliable auto-focus and excessively long shutter speeds in low light caused many shots to lack detail. Still, if the camera automatically increased its ISO speed in low light, we would have criticised the unacceptably high noise levels; ISO 400 gave poor results and the top ISO 1,600 setting is pointless. Colours were above average, though, tending towards punchy, flattering tones.

Image-quality niggles and the basic lens mean this isn't a camera for photography enthusiasts. It's a decent choice if style and compactness are prime concerns, but Panasonic's DMC-FX3 isn't much bigger and offers far superior image quality.