Why You Can Trust CNET Canon Digital IXUS 75 review: Canon Digital IXUS 75
Don't look directly at it, or the Canon Digital IXUS 75 will hypnotise you. Any worries you might have over its price tag, lack of features and average megapixels and zoom will be eased by its massive screen and smart styling. You've been sufficiently warned -- this camera is a charmer
The Canon Digital IXUS 75 is a stylish slimline compact camera with an enormous LCD screen and plenty of bits under the bonnet.
Canon Digital IXUS 75
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
While 7 megapixels is by no means the highest resolution around, does the IXUS 75 have enough tricks up its exquisitely tailored sleeve to make it worth the £150-£200 price tag? We tested to see if the IXUS 75 was a significant improvement over the popular IXUS 70.
Design
The IXUS series is one of the most stylish compact ranges around. The IXUS 75's two-tone black and silver styling slashes diagonally across the frame, and looks great with a milled black ring around the lens. At just 20mm deep, the plastic body feels light yet sturdy but is prone to scratches.
The IXUS 75's best design feature is the enormous 76mm (3-inch) LCD screen. This gives loads of extra real estate for composing or viewing your images.
Considering that there aren't many features on the IXUS 75, there's quite a lot of buttons. The circular clickpad and central function button on our model felt rather gummy and loose in their housing, while the function button is slightly too bulbous to make the surrounding pad truly comfortable.
However, the clickpad's ability to sense where you're resting your finger and display the options onscreen is a clever twist. You can also customise the print options button as a shortcut to adjust settings like exposure compensation and white balance while in shooting mode.
Features
The IXUS 75 is a little light on features. There's no optical image stabilisation or internal memory, and the features you do get are rather lacklustre. The f/2.8-4.9, 3x zoom lens with a focal length range equivalent to 35 by 105mm is pretty standard.
Unlike other compacts, the IXUS 75's face detection merely finds one face per photo. The flash options are just on or off, and red-eye reduction can only be applied manually in playback mode by moving a frame over the subject's eyes. It's fiddly and best left to your photo software.
You don't get any internal memory but we actually like that, as compact onboard memories are usually so paltry as to be utterly pointless. An equally paltry 32MB SD card is bundled with the IXUS 75 (nine pictures, anyone?) so you'll have to invest in more memory.
There's the usual wealth of scene modes, white balance presets and broad ISO range, but neither manual control nor aperture or shutter-priority. Menus are correspondingly simple, with the only minor inconsistency being that the delete button calls up a general menu instead of going straight to the delete function.
The IXUS 75 goes some way to redeeming itself with its all-important focus assist lamp, often omitted on budget cameras, for helping the autofocus work its mojo in low light.
The self-timer is also well-thought out, allowing you to set your own interval up to 10 seconds, or opt for 15 or 30 seconds of face-aching grins.
Performance
Start up time is near instantaneous. Autofocus is very fast even in low light, thanks to the assist lamp. It does tend to pick the nearest subject, so you may prefer to turn it off and use the centre-weighted focus option instead. This will turn off face detection, though.
The IXUS 75 will capture images about 1.5 seconds apart without flash, and takes just over two seconds with flash. In bright shooting conditions, shutter lag is 0.5 seconds and just under in one second in dim conditions.
Continuous shooting mode is less impressive, failing to top 1.5 frames per second even at lower resolutions. In burst mode, the IXUS 75 happily continued snapping until the memory card was full.
Image quality
Exposure is excellent, and colours
are accurately reproduced. There is some vivid purple fringing in high
contrast areas but this is the only problem in picture quality.
Metering and white balance are both excellent.
The real ace up the IXUS 75's sleeve is its high ISO performance. This is frequently where compacts fall down. By contrast, the IXUS 75 employs excellent noise reduction and clever sharpening. Noise is inevitably visible at high ISOs, but even at 1,600 pictures are acceptable.
The video mode offers a maximum of VGA resolution (640x480 pixels) at 30fps. Only mono audio is available, and the optical zoom cannot be used when filming. The footage does look good though, thanks to Canon's use of MJPEG format, which compresses video less than other MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 formats. This does mean that videos eat up more memory than usual.
Conclusion
It's hard to dislike the IXUS 75, despite its paucity of
features. The excellent picture quality, big screen and smart styling
easily cancel any misgivings about the otherwise average megapixel and
zoom specs.
The real question is whether the IXUS 75 competes on price with similarly-specced cameras such as the Pentax Optio M30 or Nikon S200, both of which weigh in at a significantly cheaper price point. While it might appear that you're paying a premium for IXUS styling, you get your money's worth with that screen and superior pictures.
Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday