Canon Ixus 850 IS -

I wanted a compact digital camera offering quality lens, ease of use, wide angle capability, image stabilisation picture quality with enough pixels to allow cropping and enlarged picture size of 16x12 inches. Research boiled down to two contenders, Panasonic FX50/FX30 and the Canon Ixus 850is. I opted for the CANON.

Initial impression is that of a very smart, stylish camera, well made and solid feel about it. The camera will work straight from the box in auto mode, point, press, shoot, forget if that is what you want but it also does an awful lot more.

Start up time from switch on is very quick as is the time lag between pressing shutter button and picture being taken. Focussing also very quick and that face recognition thingy is spooky but useful.

Put it through its 7 Mega pix paces, almost abused it. The effective 28mm wide angle lens was much more useful than the normal 35mm and the 3.8:1 optical zoom ratio gave a decent rang. The smart digital zoom is a very useful feature for occasional use and even at 15x zoom the noise on the picture was acceptable particularly in strong daylight.

I was struggling to find anything show stopping about the 850. Pictures were very sharp, colours vibrant and bold and the IS really worked, good layout on the rear and it was easy to hold. The 2.5" screen was bright and clear. Occasionally noticed red eye when using flash but not serious.

Evening shots were simple without flash, noise was not particularly evident even in quite a dark room and the AE was so effective most of my indoor pictures were better without flash.

Battery life is excellent, I gave it some real hammer over a whole day taking well over 100 pics using flash, zoom control and screen reviewing and no low battery warnings.

Until Canon bring out a similar wide angle lens on a 10 Mega Pixel with Image stabilisation (neither of which the Ixus 900 has) then this would be my preferred buy.