The Ixus brand is usually associated with luxury rather than good value, but Canon has combined both in this latest entry-level model. Its curved metal body looks gorgeous, and it's backed up by some impressive specs including optical stabilisation, a 3in LCD screen, an HDMI output and 1080p video recording.

It's extremely petite, but we'd have preferred a few extra millimetres' width to give more room for the controls. The small navigation pad sits flush with the camera body, making it fiddly to use. A switch on the top toggles between Auto mode and whichever other mode was last selected. The options include various scene presets, a panorama stitch function and slow-motion video capture, which records at 240fps, playing back at 30fps for 8x slow-motion. The 320x240 resolution looks blocky but there's still lots of fun to be had here.

A Program mode also nestles among these options and provides access to ISO speed, white balance, metering and a generous selection of other picture tweaks. Performance in normal use was nothing special at 2.5 seconds between shots, but continuous mode was seriously fast, running at 2.2fps until the card was full.