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Canon autumn product launch: The compacts

By Rich Trenholm on 22 August 2007, 12:06pm

Digital Cameras

Canon showed off 30 photography, video and printing products at a white-draped warehouse on London's Brick Lane. Yesterday we highlighted the consumer EOS 40D and the 21-megapixel EOS-1Ds Mark III, and today we bring you the best of the rest: the IXUS 960 IS, IXUS 860 IS, PowerShot G9, PowerShot SX100 IS, PowerShot A650 IS and PowerShot A720 IS.

As you may have guessed by the names, all these cameras pack optical image stabilisation (including the G9, despite not having the tell-tale IS on the end). Another thing the new cameras have in common is the DIGIC III image processors to do their brain-work. The EOS-1Ds Mark III, meanwhile, has two.

Let's kick things off with the 960 IS, Canon's new flagship IXUS model. According to Canon, the titanium shell encasing this camera is stronger than steel, but fortunately it's lighter -- apparently it's styled on bubblewrap. The 960 IS has 3.7x optical zoom and a 64mm (2.5-inch) PureColor LCD screen. It packs 12.1 megapixels of detail into your pictures and there's 18 different shooting modes, plus auto ISO Shift and high ISO 1600 for low-light shooting.

A new resizing function cuts out the image-editing middleman by downsizing full-resolution images to 1,600x1,200-pixel, 640x480-pixel and 320x240-pixel sizes. It would be good if this also dropped the resolution to Web-friendly 72dpi.

With the Digital IXUS 960 IS, users can shoot video -- with sound, fancy -- at an extra large XGA (1,024x768-pixel) resolution. Although this is the highest movie resolution in the IXUS range, it does come at 15fps. Alternatively, VGA and QVGA quality movies can be shot at 30fps. There's also a time lapse movie function, capturing 1 frame of footage per 1 or 2 seconds for up to 2 hours, if you have the patience, and replays them as a VGA movie at 15fps.

The 960 IS also harks back to the days of bunging in a tape to record late-night films with a long play mode that offers VGA movie capture at 30fps. This somehow produces movies at half the file size with no loss in resolution or frame rate.

The 960 IS will be available in September for £369.

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