Canon Digital IXUS 850 IS

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49283717,00.htm

Reviewed 10 October 2006

Reviewed by Will Greenwald

Last spring, Canon impressed us with its stylish high-end shooter, the 6-megapixel Digital IXUS 800 IS. It had a great lens and produced great images, all in an attractive, pocketable, metal body. With the follow-up Digital IXUS 850 IS, Canon improves upon its previous design by squeezing in a wider lens and a higher resolution sensor.

Design
The 7-megapixel camera's tiny body is shiny, curvy and very attractive. But it may be too stylish for its own good. For instance, the power button is a tiny, illuminated half-oval built flush into the top panel -- without actually pressing it, you might easily mistake it for an indicator light or a design flaw.

Beyond those quirks, though, the 850 IS is a standard, straightforwardly designed Canon shooter, with a four-way navigation switch, additional buttons and the shutter-release/zoom-rocker mechanism we've grown used to. The small, all-metal body weighs slightly more than 170g, and at 25mm thick, is just the right size for most pockets. Though small, the camera still has enough room on its body to hold both a 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD and an optical viewfinder, a rare and welcome feature on an ultracompact.

Features
The IXUS 850 IS's most prominent feature is its image-stabilised, f/2.8-to-f/5.8, 28mm-to-105mm-equivalent lens. The 3.8x zoom range offers the flexibility of wide-angle focal lengths, while still providing more zoom power than the average 3x point-and-shoot lens. Though the 800 IS had a 4x zoom lens, the 850 IS's 28mm-equivalent wide shot more than makes up for the slightly smaller telephoto factor.

In addition to the flexible lens, the 850 IS has some handy snapshot features. The camera's sensor can be boosted to as high as ISO 1,600 for low-light or high-movement shots, though you'll want to keep it at ISO 800 or lower because of image noise. You can shoot 30fps VGA video, or bump it up to 60fps QVGA (320x240-pixel) resolution to capture action footage for half-speed playback. If you're looking for manual controls, however, look elsewhere -- like the 800, the 850's aperture and shutter settings can't be changed at all, its focus modes are all automatic, and the camera's manual mode allows only exposure compensation, colour correction, metering and white-balance adjustments.

Performance
The IXUS 850 IS also uses the recent Digic III image processor, which Canon claims improves image quality, performance and battery life. We didn't notice any significant improvements over the 800's already good performance, but the 850 seemed slightly more responsive than its predecessor. It performed excellently in our tests.

Just 1.1 seconds after the power button was pressed, it was able to take its first shot and subsequently could snap off a shot every 1.3 seconds. Even with the onboard flash enabled, we experienced a lag of only 2 seconds between shots. Shutter lag was a negligible 0.4 seconds. The only disappointment was the camera's burst mode, which managed only one shot per second.
 

 
Image quality
Photos were attractive, with fine detail rendering and solid colour reproduction. Aside from some slight purple fringing along the borders of bright subjects, we noticed few distortions or aberrations in our photos. Image noise was acceptable to as high as ISO 800, manifesting as a fine grain that dulled colours but otherwise didn't mar photo quality too much. ISO 1,600 was a different story: a sparkly, static-filled mess that made the photo look as if it were received via a television antenna.

The Canon Digital IXUS 850 IS is a great point-and-shoot camera. It's small, it sports a stabilised, wide-angle lens, and it can pump out beautiful shots at a pretty rapid pace. If you want higher resolution and don't mind losing the optical image stabilisation -- though we don't recommend the trade-off -- the Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti and the Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 offer 10 megapixels in ultracompact bodies.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide