Canon Digital Ixus 75 review

Canon's Ixus range is synonymous with stylish design, and while the front of the Ixus 75 is typically slinky, things get more interesting around the back.

The 3in, 230,000-pixel screen dominates. When switched off it looks much darker than most screens, which helps to give excellent contrast when it's switched on. The five-way navigation pad has a novel feature: pushing it gently shows an animated preview of what would happen if you were to push it fully. It's pretty pointless, as the pad is clearly labelled with the same information, but it adds some pizzazz to proceedings. The straightforward controls and menus are typical of Canon, and it's good to see that ISO has its own button, showing that Canon recognises how important a feature it is, even on a point-and-shoot camera. The body is smooth with little to grip on to, so one-handed shooting isn't advisable.

Canon's latest Digic III processor delivers impressive performance. The camera took 1.5 seconds to switch on and capture a picture, and 1.9 seconds between subsequent shots. The 1.6fps continuous mode is impressive at this price, and best of all is the auto-focus, which locked on to subjects in around half a second, even in low light at telephoto zoom settings. Flash recharge times are slow, though, at around four seconds. Battery life is disappointing, too, no doubt partly because of the power-zapping big screen.

The Digic III processor also provides face detection to help with focus and exposure. This is switched on by default, and we found it fast and accurate at tracking faces. The resulting photos were superbly exposed, and the camera coped well with difficult lighting to give attractive portraits. It passed other colour tests with distinction, producing flattering skin tones under artificial and flash lighting and capturing subtle shades of foliage accurately.

Detail was a little disappointing, falling short of the standard set by Canon's PowerShot A630, although the difference was subtle in outdoor shots. Our biggest concern was the amount of noise in pictures. Shooting indoors without the flash, ISO 400 produced scruffy-looking results, while ISO 800 and 1600 proved unusable as the subject disappeared under a blizzard of noise. The Auto ISO mode seemed to be aware of the camera's limitations and restricted ISO settings to 200 or lower, but this resulted in blur-inducing long shutter speeds in low light. Meanwhile, the Hi ISO setting used values from 80 to 800, but was too quick to jump to higher settings, increasing noise unnecessarily.

The level of noise in the Ixus 75's images is disappointing, but nevertheless most of its photos looked excellent. With fast performance and smart styling, it's an attractive package.