Canon Ixus 900 Ti digital camera

New to Canon's Ixus range, the 900 Ti is leader of the pack with 10 megapixels of shooting power housed in a sleek matt titanium chassis.

With eye-catching headline features such as these, the inclusion of just a 3x optical zoom is slightly disappointing, especially when manufacturers such as Kodak are now including dual lens systems in their newest compact cameras for more powerful zooming. Nonetheless, the zoom itself is fairly responsive even though itís a little jerky to operate and quite noisy.

The 2.5in screen at the rear of the camera displays images clearly and responds quickly to changing lighting levels. In review mode it adjusts the orientation of the image displayed according to the way the camera is held so the snap always appears to be the right way up to the viewer - a nice touch.

Just to the right of the screen is the control dial that gives fast access to flash, macro, landscape and self timer settings in shooting mode.

This dial is actually touch-sensitive, although this feature only really comes into its own in review mode, when it can be used to scroll quickly through images. It can't be used to whiz through the options in the regular settings menus as you would using the similar-looking control dial on an iPod, which is a shame.

There's also an optical viewfinder just above the screen; a feature we're seeing less and less of in compact digital cameras these days, but one that certainly still has its uses in conditions when it's harder to see what's displayed on the screen and for conserving battery life.

The mode dial lets you switch between auto shooting mode, automated scene mode, manual mode, review and video shooting mode. There are 18 automated modes in the scene settings line-up with all the usual suspects present including beach, snow and kids and pets for fast moving or unpredictable subjects.

Using the stitch assist tool it's possible to take up to 26 overlapping images and later stitch them together to make one continuous panoramic image. The right hand edge of the previous shot taken is displayed on the left hand side of the screen to make lining up shots easier.

In addition to these point-and-shoot modes, manual adjustments can be made to white balance, exposure, ISO and metering settings.

The 900 Ti offers manually adjustable ISO speeds up to ISO 1600 for flash-free indoor shooting. While itís true that this does allow you to capture shots in low lighting conditions that would be far too dark at lower ISO speeds, at ISO 1600 our resulting test shots were - unsurprisingly - horribly noisy.

We were more impressed by the Canon's minimum focusing distance of just 5cm in macro mode, which put in an excellent performance in our tests, producing incredibly detailed close-ups.

Image quality was, on the whole, extremely good. Colours were strong without being saccharine and detail was well captured right into the corners of our test images.

The titanium casing and the 10 megapixel image sensor that grabbed our attention at the start of this review were always going to nudge up the asking price for this camera, but at £399 it really is stretching the budget of the amateur photographer it's aimed at.

It's still a decent camera and is simple to use, but we had hoped Canon would raise the benchmark of what we can expect of a compact digital camera with this new Ixus launch.

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