Canon Ixus 980 IS

Although it is apparently not intended as a direct replacement of the Ixus 970 IS, Canon's new Ixus 980 IS has a lot of new features.

Out goes the older model's 10 Megapixel sensor, replaced by one boasting 14.7 Megapixels; also new are a DIGIC 4 processor, a special contrast handling system dubbed i-contrast and a Quickshot mode to offer speedier autofocus.

Are all of these upgrades enough to keep Canon's flagship digital compact at the top of its game?

Handling

The Ixus 980 IS boasts a solid frame which is well though-out, and the round forms on the right hand side of the case make it easy to get a good grip on it.

Canon has also paid attention to the layout of the controls on the back, and the scroll wheel is particularly useful: depending on where you are in the interface, it serves to either scroll through the menus or modify a particular setting.

A separate switch allows you to switch between the four main modes (automatic, manual, scene and video).

The software is as easy to use as the hardware, and getting your head around the menus only takes a matter of minutes.

Unlike with some other recent compacts, you can't customize the interface in any way, so you'll have to stick to Canon's logic--which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hardware

The optical zoom gains an extra millimeter in wide angle mode (it's now 36 mm, rather than 37 mm), but loses a lot more in telephoto mode (a 133 mm lens replaces the 970 IS' 185 mm).

For wide angle shots, the lens a decent aperture, even it does a little less well for telephoto mode (f/5.8), and it's a little noisier than we're used to on Canon compacts.

The LCD screen is good quality, but the inclusion of a viewfinder limits its size to 2.5 inch, which is a shame as the optical viewfinder is not very useful and hardly a feature popular amongst a compact's target audience.

In bright light, the screen performs well, with fluid movement updated accurately, and is perfectly useable in the shade, too, albeit with a little distortion.

This is a very nippy little camera, taking just 1.4 seconds to switch on and then less than a second to autofocus.

In between one shot and the next, you'll never have to wait more than two seconds.

The only point at which the 980 IS does slow down is in accessing photos  saved on a memory card, and its burst mode, at 1.6 frames per second, could be a little faster.


Image Quality

With a 14.7 Megapixel sensor and a new DIGIC 4 chip, the Ixus 980 IS is clearly destined to perform well even at very fast speeds.

Working from the lowest ISO numbers up, noise is entirely absent from 80 to 200 ISO, where shots are nice and detailed, with the lens producing slightly sharper results than, for instance, the Panasonic FX150 or the Nikon S710.

Chromatic aberration is definitely under control, and is hardly visible even on A4 prints, although some detail is lost around the edge of the frame.

What little purple fringing there is is unlikely to be very off-putting and hardly ruins photos.

Right up to 800 ISO, noise is well-handled, but then colored pixels start to appear where they shouldn't and blurriness begins to wash out some of the details.

1600 ISO really is this compact's upper limit, with blurring leaving colors very flat in dark areas.

At these speeds, the Panasonic FX150 has the advantage.


A 5 cm macro mode gives great results, and the flash is useful for portrait shots taken at a distance of round two meters.

Disappointingly, the video mode is stuck at VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels), despite the general push to High Definition elsewhere in the consumer electronics market, and you still can't zoom while recording a video clip.

Finally, the optical stabilization is powerful, and usually provides sharp results at 1/3 s, but you'll need to go to 1/5 s to be sure of convincing results.