Canon PowerShot SD870 IS (Digital IXUS 860 IS / IXY Digital 910 IS)

Opinion: The SD870 won out over the SD960 because of the 3" screen and 28mm wide angle.

Image quality is good in low light. There is some distortion and softness in corners but this is not noticible on prints.

Features are excellent. Colour accent allows you to pick out one colour and the rest are black and white. Panorama stich works well. 16x9 photos can be taken at 3264x1832 (6mb). Image stabiliser is great in low light conditions. Hi iso also works well. Processing of images include red eye reduction, black and white, sepia, vivid, resize etc.

Movies are very good quality and LP option alows 640x480 recording at about 1mb/s. A 4gb SD card will give you over 1 hour of constant recording. The speaker/sound record is in top right and is easily covered by finger leading to muffled recording. Time lapse function is great

Wide angle zoom is great (but you will notice slight distortion with straight lines) while the 1.6x and 2.0x tele converter gives a zoom up to 210mm without any digital zoom application.

The screen is extremly bright and very usable in bright sunlight. There is no protective lip around so it is at danger of being scratched. Images will automatticaly rotate in review (portrait or landscape) depending upon how you hold the camera... very cool :-).

Manual controls are quiet good for a ultra compact including ISO, exposure, white balance & colour effect (sepia, BW, vivid etc).

Face detection works great meaning no images focused or forground or background. There are a lot of preset scenes (snow, beach, fireworks, underwater party etc etc) and the few i have used work very well.

The print button can be customized to half a dozen other options which is handy.

Overall it does have a few problems but is probably the best ultra compact available with 3" screen, wide angle and heaps of features.

Opinion: Firstly, I’m no photography expert by any stretch of the imagination (just like 90% of people who use cameras I suspect) so I’d like to give a very layman’s terms review of the Canon IXUS860IS.

I just wanted a decent digital point-and-shoot that I could keep in my pocket wherever I went. I probably did a bit too much research (on this and other sites) and got too many opinions in the month leading up to my purchase. Most of the cameras I was considering had some of my criteria but not others.

I was very happy when Canon suddenly announced the 860IS which seemed to tick all my boxes – 28mm, 3’’ screen, great features such as Face Detection, Image Stabilization and Red Eye ‘Correction’ (which is brilliant) – It’s also compact and stylish.

I’ll be taking a lot of indoor shots of people in bars/clubs and so the 28mm is perfect. The wide angle also works great outdoors and I think I’ve found my inner photo-artiste (yes, even with this small camera). Some of the gimmicks/features I’m still trying to get my head around but I think, in time, I will work them all out and they’ll be a lot of fun to use.

I haven’t really found any problems other than I need to make an effort to take more shots. So, if you’re looking for a fantastic compact digital that ‘ticks all the boxes’, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Opinion: Used as a take everywhere camera and to supplement my DSLR. Great features. Use it at work and play. IS is good especially with used with the ISO boost. Really like the time-lapse video feature. Screen is very clear even in bright lighting and I don't miss not having a view finder at all. WA makes taking photos in confined spaces a breeze. Menu is easy to maneuver around in and click to picture time is amazingly fast. Construction of the camera body is above average but even though the screen is scratch resistance I still put a PDA screen protector over it as extra protection. Controls well placed inspite of the large screen.

Opinion: Very portable, quite a lot of features if you venture thru the many options. IQ is great, speed is very good. Video is very good also. Would have given the features a 5 if it had HD video or at least Widescreen video. Nonetheless, after trying out the Kodak v1253 and Pana TZ3 for a few days each, this one exceed both for me. TZ3 had bad IQ and the v1253 was slow.