BIOS: Technology Means Business

There are three things that strike you about the IXUS 750 (PowerShot ELPH SD550 in the US): its compact size; solid and robust design; and the large 2.5-inch screen which occupies most of the camera's rear. The fact that the camera offers a capture resolution of 7.1-Megapixels (3072x2304 pixels) is also impressive.

The Digital IXUS flagship, the Digital IXUS 750 (Current Best Price: £276/$359) maintains the style and sophistication for which Canon's IXUS brand is renowned. The elegant 'perpetual curve' design (90x57x27.4mm, 170g) returns and is available in two eye-catching finishes - Silver Grey and Satin Beige. Featuring a new interpretation of the iconic 'box and circle' design (one edge of the camera is rounded), the Digital IXUS 750 sports DIGIC II processing and comes with a 3x optical zoom (37- to 111mm equivalent) - ideal for casual shutter bugs.

The all-metal Digital IXUS 750 features an impressive 2.5-inch LCD display but still manages to retain the basic of controls needed to get the best from the camera. The relatively large LCD is bright and crisp and its wide viewing angle make it comfortable to view and share images and movies during playback. The LCD also makes it easy to frame a shot and view menus, and is adjustable to 15 levels of brightness. New slideshow functions allow review of images with transition effects applied in the camera to create decent slideshows with minimum effort.

The Digital IXUS 750 offers a capture resolution of 7.1-Megapixels, which can give detailed prints up to A2 in size. The camera lens is constructed with seven elements in five groups, and includes two Ultra High Refractive Index Aspherical (UA) elements for true-to-life colours and crisp, high-contrast images. Canon's DIGIC II processor helps to ensure that recorded images have superb resolution and colour quality, and the 9-point AiAF automatically focus on the subject, even when it's off-centre. Three methods of exposure control can be selected (evaluative, centre-weighted, and spot) and ISO can be set to Auto, 50, 100, 200 or 400.

The Digital IXUS 750 offers a relatively wide range of pre-set settings by providing 15 different shooting modes. A selection can be made from Auto, Manual, Portrait, Landscape and Night Snapshot modes, or from the scene modes that now include an underwater setting, allowing you to take full advantage of the optional Waterproof Case (WP-DC80). Underwater mode adjusts the white balance specifically for underwater shots, allowing capture of authentic colours and minimising any blue cast.

We also liked the special effects such as Colour Swap or Custom Colour, which allows you to select your preferred colour balance for any given shot. This can be performed in-camera and viewed on the LCD while shooting stills and movies. These effects could previously only be achieved using computer-based software after shooting. The Digital IXUS 750's Intelligent Orientation Sensor also recognises when the camera is rotated from horizontal to vertical, automatically rotating stored images for correct playback. To help keep the camera level with the horizon and to assist with image composition, you can even opt to display gridlines on the LCD.

Some other neat features include a built-in flash, new world time zone display that allows you set home and destination country time zones, as well as animated displays and improved warnings for camera shake. The camera menu can also be displayed in 22 different languages, VGA movies can be captured in VGA and QVGA at 30- or 15fps, and continuous filming is available until the file size has reached 1GB or 60 minutes (whichever is reached first). Power comes in the form of a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery (NB-3L) which should be good enough for around 150 shots or approximately 180 minutes of image/video playback.

Printing of images without having to connect to a computer is made simpler via the Print/Share button, which also acts as an easy upload button for Windows XP and Mac OS X, and a USB port lets you connect directly to compatible printers. Alternatively, you can print directly from an Secure Digital (SD) Card or MultiMediaCard (MMC) card (32MB SD card supplied).

Software supplied with the camera is useful and includes Canon's ZoomBrowser EX 5.5, PhotoRecord 2.2 (Windows) and ImageBrowser 5.5 (Macintosh) for image download, storage and retrieval, as well as management of image layout and printing. PhotoStitch 3.1 lets you create panoramas, while Movie Edit Task is used for editing movie footage. Also included is PhotoStudio, image-editing software by ArcSoft. While all of the programs can be bettered, they are nevertheless a welcome addition that will help you to get the best out of the camera from day one.

Image quality was excellent for a camera in this class. It's also fast, responsive and reliable, and it is one of the few cameras on the market today that has a true luxury feel to it. The Digital IXUS 750's F2.8-4.9 lens produced negligible trace of corner blurring in our tests, although it did show some barrel distortion at the widest setting. Noise control was very good at lower ISO settings, although it did get a little loud at 400 ISO. Nevertheless, images were smooth, clean, bright and lifelike and will suit typical users looking to print high-quality images at home quickly and easily. Battery life when using the screen could be better, but overall the camera is outstanding - as long as price and high-end customisable features aren't a factor. [8]