Canon Digital IXUS 75

Sandwiched between similar 7-megapixel siblings, the Canon IXUS 75 nevertheless manages to distinguish itself as a well-designed, practical option for snapshooters who favour big LCDs over optical viewfinders.

Design
The 130 gram IXUS 75's 92mm by 57mm by 20mm body will fit just as comfortably in a pants pocket. It comes in silver and silver with black accents, the latter design recalling Canon's early film models.

The Touch Dial Control -- so named for its optional ability to display a virtual dial when you simply touch the control -- quickly accesses the small set of shooting options, including ISO speed, flash mode, macro/infinite focus, and continuous/timer. Though it doesn't offer manual or semi-manual exposure modes, it does supply a host of color enhancements and scene modes, exposure compensation, and a choice of three metering modes.

Features
For focus, Canon provides a face-detection AF mode, which automatically locates a face (just one) and determines focus and metering for it. That's in addition to the company's standard AiAF automatic focus-point selector and center focus.

The face-detect AF works reasonably well, but the option is buried within the menus and only works in conjunction with the AiAF; that is, if it doesn't find a face, it falls back on AiAF. This reviewer generally doesn't like the automatic focus selection on any camera -- they never seem to find the desired subject, just the closest. So we don't like the face-detection option stuck in a set-it-and-forget-it location. You may feel otherwise.

Overall, however, we find the IXUS 75's layout intelligent and comfortable to use. It has a big 3-inch LCD for framing and playback. The LCD appears bright and easy to see, even in direct sunlight, although it also tends to look a bit coarse.

Performance and image quality
Photo and movie quality rank high for an ultracompact with its f/2.8-4.9 35mm-105mm (35mm equivalent) 3x zoom lens, and Digic III processor. The photos from the IXUS 75 look a bit better, especially vis-a-vis high ISO noise.

As measured by CNET Labs' tests and in photo samples, the IXUS 75's noise profile generally outperformed the IXUS 800 IS. With the exception of photos shot under our extremely warm tungsten lights, white balance, exposure, and saturation look very good. Movies look equally good, in part because Canon captures in MJPEG, which uses far less compression than other cameras' MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 formats. As a result, a 30fps 640 x 480 movie uses about 2MB per second of storage.

On the other hand, the IXUS 75's performance is acceptable. It takes 1 second from start to shoot, with subsequent photos about 1.6 seconds apart without flash and 2.3 seconds with the flash enabled. Shutter lag measures 0.5 second in our high-contrast test, which mimics bright shooting conditions, and 0.9 second in our low-contrast test, which mimics dim shooting conditions. Continuous shooting was the only disappointment -- approximately 1.6 frames per second regardless of image size.

It may lack the image stabilisation of the IXUS 800 IS, but the Canon IXUS 75 has a more elegant, cutting-edge design, large LCD and -- to our eyes, at least -- better photo quality.

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