Product Reviews

Canon's Digital IXUS 50, the latest addition to its line of sleek, tiny digital cameras, combines its predecessors' sexy looks with excellent performance and some very neat tricks.

Worth noting among its lengthy spec list are the 5-megapixel CCD, 3x optical zoom, and 2in LCD display. The LCD screen, which is mounted on the camera's rear, is particularly impressive on such a small camera. It takes up a sizeable chunk of the rear surface and is bright and clear, making it easy to both compose and review shots, even outdoors in daylight.

In addition to shooting still images at up to 2560 x 1920 pixels - enough for decent prints at up to 10 x 8in -the IXUS 50 will record 640 x 480 pixel video clips at 30 frames per second for as long as the memory card lasts. Speaking of memory cards, the IXUS 50 ships with a 16MB SD card, which is a little mean on a camera in this price bracket. The supplied card will only hold a handful of shots at full resolution and maximum quality. However, a little bit of shopping around will yield heavy discounts, with the option of adding a much higher-capacity memory card.

If the specifications and looks of the IXUS 50 are impressive in a £300 camera,

There are 10 shooting modes, including manual, fully automatic and six 'Special Scene' modes that preset exposure and white balance for specific scenes. Most impressive among the shooting modes is My Colours, which offers control over colour in stills and movies before you shoot. For example, you can lighten or darken skin tones or swap one colour in the scene with another. Our favourite is Colour Accent, which allows you to select a colour from the scene, isolate it and make everything else in the scene monochrome. This is an effect that's relatively easy to achieve in editing software, but the ability to do it in-camera is fantastic.

Image transfer from camera to Mac is speedy, thanks to the USB 2 interface. The output from the IXUS 50 lives up to expectations, thanks in part to the Digic II image processor. Images are bright, sharp and noise free, and we would be more than happy to use it for family and holiday snaps.

There is little to dislike about the IXUS 50. It is small and light enough to carry around in your pocket and robust enough to take the bumps and knocks of everyday use. Handling is good, image quality is excellent and the feature set is second to none. Unless you need to print images larger than 10 x 8in, there is no reason to look elsewhere for a compact digital camera - particularly as you can buy an IXUS 50 online for less than £250.