The Digital IXUS 700 offers a whopping 7.1 megapixels; that's a resolution of 3,072 x 2,304 pixels. If you belong to the 'more is better' brigade, you'll be slavering at this thought, but take note that images at this resolution can be memory hungry. Our test photos taken at this top resolution and the highest quality the camera could manage (it offers three compression settings) produced images between 3.3MB and 5MB in size.
What that means is that you'll need plenty of storage. Canon provides a 32MB SD card, and frankly that's not good enough. We got just seven images onto it. You can drop down increments of both images size and quality to 640 x 480, and at the lowest image quality you can get around 265 images onto the same card, but really, what's the point of buying a 7-megapixel camera to shoot at such low quality? So we have to say come on, Canon, ship larger SD cards please.
That's one of our two gripes with what is a very good camera. The other gripe is that optical zooming still manages just 3x. Although you can squeeze 12x zoom out of the Digital IXUS 700, you resort to digital once you breach the 3x limit. How we long for more optical zooming on a digital compact camera. Digital zooming is available when shooting movies as well as stills, and movies come in at various resolutions up to 640 x 480, their length limited by the amount of memory on your card.
There are plenty of options, and we really like the fact that you can vary the shutter speed - in this case letting it run for as long as 15 seconds (don't try this without a solid stand for the camera!). A new feature, MyColors, automatically adjusts the colours in an image so you can compensate for lighting conditions or play around with images to get different ambiance. It's great fun, and you can even get the camera to automatically save a non colour-adjusted version of your image too.
Ease of use is high on Canon's agenda, and tapping the round selector button variously provides quick access to features like the flash, self timer and macro mode, while routes into the other options are usually intuitive. The camera is smaller and lighter than the previous flagship model, the Digital IXUS 500, and has a more stylish, less square look too. Having a 2.0-inch LCD for framing and viewing shots is simply stupendous in comparison to the smaller offerings we are used to.
