Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti review

The 10-megapixel Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti manages to be stylish without being inconvenient or awkward. Its sturdy metal body, an attractive matte-grey with black accents, is smooth and slightly curvy, and at 190g and 28mm thick, it's just the right size to fit into a jacket pocket.

Design
All the controls are on the camera's right side, so nearly every button is within thumb's reach for comfortable one-handed use. A 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen takes up most of the camera's remaining back panel but leaves enough room for an optical viewfinder. The viewfinder is small and awkward, but it provides a welcome alternative to the LCD.

Features
While the 900 Ti is heavy on style, like most of the SD series, it's pretty light on features. You can adjust the white balance, the exposure compensation, the ISO sensitivity, and the metering settings, but in true point-and-shoot fashion, most shooting happens with the camera in automatic mode or through its handful of scene presets. It offers 30fps VGA movie capture or XGA (1,024x768-pixel) movies at 15fps.

Unlike the IXUS 850 IS, with its relatively fast, wide-angle lens, the 900 Ti sports a rather mundane f/2.8-to-f/4.9, 37mm-to-111mm-equivalent model. It features the recent Digic III image processor, which Canon claims improves performance, image quality and battery life over the previous chip. We've haven't seen any significant improvement over past-generation cameras, but the 900 Ti's predecessors, the IXUS 60 and the IXUS 65, already boast strong performance and image quality.

Performance
The Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti is a moderately fast shooter, especially for a 10-megapixel model. After waiting 1.3 seconds from power-on to first shot, we managed to snap one photo every 2.3 seconds. With the onboard flash enabled, that wait increased to a still-respectable 3 seconds. The shutter felt quite responsive, lagging only 0.5 seconds in bright light and 0.9 seconds in dim conditions. Burst mode was predictably slow, shooting a full-resolution photo once every 0.9 seconds. 
 

Shooting speed (Seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (typical)

Casio Exilim EX-Z1000

3.5 

1.8 

0.3 

Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti

2.3 

1.3 

0.5 

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10

1.6 

1.4 

0.5 

Typical continuous-shooting speed (Frames per second)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Typical continuous-shooting speed

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10

1.3 

Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti

0.9 

Casio Exilim EX-Z1000

0.4 

 
Images
The camera generally produces very solid photos. They're extremely sharp in the centre, though like many competitors' shots, there's severe softness around the edges of the frame, which can result in glowy edges on objects. Colours are a little cool but nicely saturated. As is typical of Canon cameras, the automatic white balance can't handle our warm tungsten lights. Noise was negligible to as high as ISO 400, and at ISO 800 became a tolerable, fine grain. ISO 1,600 images were predictably bad, with details hidden and colours muted by a pronounced layer of staticky, sparkly artefacts.

A solid, handy, compact camera, the Canon Digital IXUS 900 Ti nevertheless lacks some useful features offered by the similarly priced IXUS 850 IS. Unless you absolutely need the extra pixels -- for, say, cropping tightly on a portion of a photo or printing to larger than 200x250mm -- you're probably better off with the faster, stabilised IXUS 850 IS.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide