Canon IXUS 970 IS

The Canon IXUS 970 IS updates the IXUS 950 IS and provides improved technology on various fronts. A 5x optical zoom lens plus another two megapixels, giving the camera ten-megapixel resolution, stand out.

The new lens has a disappointing wide end of just 37mm but a respectable long zoom end of 185mm; maximum apertures run from f3.2 to f5.7, so again, modest, but helped by the inclusion of optical image stabilisation.

The camera’s swooping, all-metal design is reminiscent of a slightly squashed Eurostar nose cone; the curve allows you to comfortably hold the camera and reach the shutter button and its encompassing zoom lens lever.

A stylised mode lever – for Manual, Scene, Video and Auto shooting modes – complements the rakish styling but unfortunately, like the 950 IS, the 970 IS has a manual mode that lacks manual controls! Okay, there’s Exposure Compensation, but that’s it, although you do get access to all the various menu control options not available in the automatic modes.

The multicontrol dial allows you to press a segment of the dial to select options such as flash or sensitivity settings but it also has a natty rotating outer dial, which, accompanied by a neatly animated menu on the screen, allows you to quickly zip through (and frustratingly, usually straight past) settings. It’s nice to use, but it also takes some getting used to prevent overshooting the mode of your choice.

A FUNC button sits in the centre of the dial, and when pressed it brings into play the Canon FUNC menu down the left side of the screen with options relating to the mode picked to the left, neatly displayed across the bottom of the screen.

You can then quickly and simply scroll across options that include white balance, metering, My Colours, the image quality and size selection menus. Other internal menu systems are very clear and simple to follow on tabbed pages for camera, setup and playback settings, and as before, the multicontroller helps quickly zip through them all.

Some of the 970’s more funky features include in-camera red-eye reduction that can be applied as a shot is made or afterwards in playback, and it works a treat too. Face Detection AF is there, though it struggles a tad on faces in profile, but otherwise it’s fast. Even better, it allows the camera to automatically bias exposure (including flash exposure when used) to the AF zone and bias white balance to help get better-rendered skin tones and it does this well.

Canon’s iSAPS technology is an intelligent scene analysis that uses a kind of expert system to look at the subject and automatically optimise camera settings for that shot and helps get the most from snaps. A movie mode includes a long play option that can be used even in high-quality mode for VGA, 30fps movies plus a funky time lapse mode can be used to great effect, creating a movie from frames shot at one- or two-second intervals.

And like the 950 IS before it, the 970’s image stabilisation works a treat and makes handholding some of the longer zoom ratios or shooting in lower light at a low ISO eminently doable, without camera shake marring the images (well, to a degree at least, since you’ll still need to support the camera if it’s very dark or for exposures over around an eighth of a second).

However, the sensitivity modes available have been improved on the 970 with a top setting of ISO 3,200 (it’s one of the 16 scene modes on offer) and provide another shooting option in low light without flash, but it’s very noisy as you might expect.

In terms of composing images, there’s a new and improved, very clear, bright and colourful 2.5-inch PureColor LCD II screen. With 230k dots, it has a good resolution and is nice to use – even in bright conditions. And should it be too bright, or you want to conserve battery power, the camera has the advantage of a small, centrally placed optical viewfinder. It’s true to say, optical viewfinders are becoming as rare as hens’ teeth these days, so it’s a welcome addition indeed.

Canon’s DIGIC III image-processing engine is responsible for the (typically) very clean, low ISO low-noise images and the speedy data processing times and the 970 IS is responsive as a result.

Start-up to shooting the first image is around 1.5 seconds, shutter lag is minimal and continuous shot-to-shot timing is an equally reasonable 1.5 seconds. Performance-wise then, the 970 does well and is on a par with its 950 brethren, even with those additional two million pixels.

With flash activated, the frame rate drops away significantly as the flash charges, but there’s still an improvement here over the 950; the recycle rate is around two seconds, shot to shot, whereas the 950 took around four seconds.

But what of the all important image quality? For a start, the new lens lacks bite at the edges, though the extra zoom length (over the 950) is handy, but the wide end is more disappointing in terms of field of view.

The AiAF focusing system is fast but also seems a bit hit and miss, which acerbates the problems with the lens’s edge softness. But switch to a single, central AF zone and you get more control back and better bite. The Face AF works well enough but as mentioned earlier, less so shooting faces in profile where it is easy to get in a muddle.

Image noise is well controlled at ISOs up to ISO 400, after which things get a bit problematic. This is largely because as noise increases, so does noise-suppression processing, and this hits the captured detail hard. Using IS and the lowest ISO possible gets better quality images because anything over a sensitivity of ISO 800, you must be prepared for leaching colour and detail as the camera’s systems process it away.

That notwithstanding, like the 950 before it, image detail is very good overall but fine detail on landscape shots is still strangely compromised when using the Landscape scene mode. In fact, all the auto settings worked over detail but at least not to such a heavy degree as the IXUS 950 IS.

The camera also struggles with shadow detail and loses a lot in highlights too, suggesting the camera’s dynamic range could be improved, and the disappointing lack of a RAW shooting option means there’s no way to claw even a little of that detail back later on PC.

Metering is excellent; nary a poor exposure in our entire test but white balance is less accomplished in the Auto mode with some odd orange colour casts in mixed lighting. However, the usual presets of daylight, shade tungsten, etc, perform better.

Overall, we believe Canon has successfully worked over issues found on the 950 IS and certainly improved overall performance, although not to the degree you might expect.

Particular plaudits should go to the faster flash recycling, and the new screen’s a little gem; the new lens, while still slightly soft, helps get you that bit closer and helps get more from the extra resolution on offer. Overall, it is a certain improvement on what went before.