Design
The 10-megapixel Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti manages to be stylish without being inconvenient or awkward. Its sturdy metal body, an attractive matte-gray with black accents, is smooth and slightly curvy, and at 190 grams and 28mm thick, it's just the right size to fit into a jacket pocket.
All the controls are on the camera's right side, so nearly every button is within thumb's reach for comfortable one-handed use. A 2.5-inch LCD screen takes up most of the camera's remaining back panel but leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder. The viewfinder is small and awkward, but it provides a welcome alternative to the LCD.
Features
While the IXUS 900 Ti is heavy on style, like most of the IXUS series, it's pretty light on features. You can adjust the white balance, the exposure compensation, the ISO sensitivity, and the metering settings, but in true point-and-shoot fashion, most shooting happens with the camera in automatic mode or through its handful of scene presets. It offers 30fps VGA movie capture or XGA (1,024 x 768) movies at 15fps.
Unlike the IXUS 850 IS, with its relatively fast, wide-angle lens, the IXUS 900 Ti sports a rather mundane F2.8-to-F4.9, 37mm-to-111mm-equivalent model. It features the recent Digic III image processor, which Canon claims improves performance, image quality, and battery life over the previous chip. We've haven't seen any significant improvement over past-generation cameras, but the IXUS 900 Ti's predecessors, the IXUS 60 and the IXUS 65, already boast strong performance and image quality.
Performance
The Canon IXUS 900 Ti is a moderately fast shooter, especially for a 10-megapixel model. After waiting 1.3 seconds from power-on to first shot, we managed to snap one photo every 2.3 seconds. With the onboard flash enabled, that wait increased to a still-respectable 3 seconds. The shutter felt quite responsive, lagging only 0.5 second in bright light and 0.9 second in dim conditions. Burst mode was predictably slow, shooting a full-resolution photo once every 0.9 second.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
Image Quality
The camera generally produces very solid photos. They're extremely sharp in the centre, though like many competitors' shots, there's severe softness around the edges of the frame, which can result in glowy edges on objects. Colours are a little cool but nicely saturated. As is typical of Canon cameras, the automatic white balance can't handle our warm tungsten lights. Noise was negligible to as high as ISO 400, and at ISO 800 became a tolerable, fine grain. ISO 1,600 images were predictably bad, with details hidden and colours muted by a pronounced layer of staticky, sparkly artifacts.
A solid, handy, compact camera, the Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti nevertheless lacks some useful features offered by the similarly priced IXUS 850 IS. Unless you absolutely need the extra pixels -- for, say, cropping tightly on a portion of a photo or printing to larger than 8 x 10 -- you're probably better off with the faster, stabilised IXUS 850 IS.
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contax camera
30/05/2008, 11:21 PM
rating
8/10
Good stylish designed camera. I like canon digital ixus 900 ti very much because of its few but really fast functions. This camera has excellent video specs also.
Pros: Decent selection of accessories.
Solid image quality.
Unique and attractive body.
Cons: Nothing special.
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alicats
09/07/2007, 01:54 PM
rating
4/10
Beware of accidentally reformatting the memory card as once you choose "ok" there is no way out!
Camera was disappointing both in quality and features. For "top of the line" point and shoot, features are light on and i found myself constantly fiddling with the settings to get a decent shot.
Cons: - too easy to reformat memory card
- automatic setting does not have a "flash definitely on" option, meaning endless fiddling to get good shots in difficult light conditions
- automatic setting does not use a flash when taking a picture of someone in front of a bright background, meaning more endless fiddling.
- I found the camera really irritating to use.
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Humga
06/05/2007, 12:11 PM
rating
9/10
Very decent camera, packs in nice features and very easy to use. Nothing specificly wrong with it except for tiny unnesscary details.
Pros: -Easy to use
-Handy functions
-GOOD BATTERY LIFE
-cheap on Ebay
-good quality pictures and video
Cons: -Nothing specific.
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Vinoth
30/04/2007, 06:30 PM
rating
10/10
greAT wonderful set
Pros: good quality of image and video's
Cons: good for beginers
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Mike
26/01/2007, 12:50 AM
rating
10/10
Awesome camera!
Pros: super easy, super clear pics. small in the pocket.
Cons: usb cover not to strong!
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Kev
16/01/2007, 10:44 PM
rating
9/10
Got this for Chrimbo and think it is great
Pros: follows the Ixus theme very well - good features and solid. DOnt agree with cracked screen people - these things dont break by themselves.
Cons: Bit of an awkward shape.
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kooplle
09/01/2007, 02:39 PM
rating
9/10
I have to agree that it's a great camera! I got it few months ago, and the only thing I could complain is that the high ISO sometimes produces noise. Other than that everything is just amazing
Pros: Great outlook
quality shooting
many shooting modes
high resolutions
improved movie mode (high resolutions video)
good battery life
Cons: noise when shoot in high ISO mode
takes up space quickly under high resolutions
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david90531
08/01/2007, 05:10 PM
rating
9/10
I got this camera just two days ago, and I must say I'm very satisfied with the quality of the pictures taken, and the speedy focusing, also the AF feature
Pros: high quality photos
fast speed(turning on)
fast focusing
Face detection feature
made with Titanum, protects the camera better
Cons: high resolutions pics take up the memory fast
red-light preventing light too bright
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woofah
04/01/2007, 02:21 PM
rating
8/10
great compact digicam compared with sony dsc's. i hope it wont break in the future
Pros: great images and nice video, 10mp it is.
Cons: noisy mechanism
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sam atkins
17/10/2006, 07:49 AM
rating
5/10
screen is dodgy!
Pros: camera takes really good photos, & exceptional video,
Cons: screen is not strong enough, mine broke after only a couple of weeks, & i was not doing anything rough with it....Also, very upseting to buy a new camera, & not be told there is a new one with 10 mp coming out 4 weeks later
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