Review Some people want style. Others want simplicity. And then there are those who want both. If you belong to this last group, then Canon’s Digital Ixus 95 IS could be just the ticket. This compact camera is aimed at the point-and-shoot snapper who fancies a camera that looks good and takes decent pictures with the minimum of effort.
Canon's Digital Ixus 95 IS
There’s no doubt about it – the Ixus 95 IS is a very good looking camera. Its metal and plastic construction neatly combines a brushed metal and chrome effect finish. The contoured body is good to hold yet, it’s an exceedingly diddy camera. Measuring just 88.5 x 54.8 x 21.8mm and weighing 140g – including battery and card – it’s small enough to disappear in man’s palm and light enough for you to forget that you’re carrying a camera.
At the top is a small power button, shutter and zoom rocker. On the back is a tiny optical viewfinder, playback button, a slider for selecting shooting modes – auto, camera or movie – and below this, a multi-controller for selecting various functions, plus macro, flash modes, a timer and exposure compensation.
Most of the back is dominated by the 2.5in LCD, composed of 230,000 dots. A small plastic cover on the right conceals a tiny USB port for AV out and PC connectivity. At the bottom is a compartment for the lithium-ion battery and the memory card. The Ixus 95 IS can take SD, SDHC and various flavours of MMC cards.
Touting a 1/2.3in CCD with 10Mp (effective) and a 3x optical zoom, the 6.2-18.6mm f/2.8-f/4.9 lens is equivalent to 35-105mm in a 35mm camera. Utilising a DIGIC 4 image processor, this Ixus features an optical image stabilizer, a shutter speed range of 15-1/1500sec, continuous shooting at 1.4fps and an ISO range of 80-1600.
For such a compact camera, few can match its range of features
Various systems include i-Contrast for boosting the exposure level in dark areas, Face Detection and Face Self Timer, Scene Detection and Motion Detection. Image resolution ranges from 3648 x 2736 to VGA, and movies are shot in VGA and QVGA resolution at 30f/s. For movies, the Motion JPEG AVI file format is used.