Canon Digital IXUS 55

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Performance
The Canon Digital IXUS 55 uses the company's Digic II DSP to boost performance to impressive levels. Shutter lag was quick at 0.5 second under high-contrast lighting and still respectable at 1.1 seconds under low-contrast lighting with focus assist switched on. A time-to-first-picture clocking of just 2.2 seconds means you won't wait long to snap off that impulse shot, and you'll be able to keep shooting every 1.62 seconds thereafter, or 3.01 seconds with flash.

	The diminutive Lithium-ion battery held up well in our tests.

Burst mode was a joy to use. You can shoot full-resolution photos until your trigger finger tires; we filled up our memory card with 143 shots in 110 seconds at a 1.3fps clip. When we dropped down to 640 x 480 resolution, the IXUS 55 plugged away at 1.7fps for 3 full minutes before we halted the test.

Battery life from the 760mAh Lithium-ion cell was also excellent, scoring 782 shots from a single charge, half of them with flash, and intermixed with plenty of zooming, picture review, and card formatting to eat up juice. A flashing red indicator appeared to warn us about 50 shots before the power pooped out, but there was nothing else to signal the waning battery before that.

The LCD viewfinder works better under dim lighting situations than it does in bright sunlight, as direct illumination tends to wash out the display. Even though there was ghosting when the camera or subject moved, the LCD is still a better choice for framing than the inaccurate optical viewfinder, which shows only 82 percent of the subject area.

Image Quality
The Canon Digital IXUS 55's image quality is marginally better than that of its 4-megapixel sibling, the IXUS 40, and the same as that of its predecessor, the IXUS 50. This camera produced photos that were sharper than the IXUS 40's, but other 5-megapixel cameras in this class have done better, particularly at the telephoto zoom position. On the plus side, there was a good range of detail in shadows and highlights, although it was often masked by JPEG artifacts. Color saturation was somewhat muted at the default setting, and there was a tendency toward yellow casts in flesh tones.

Chromatic aberration cropped up as purple fringing around backlit subject matter, and noise, not much of a problem at ISO 50 or ISO 100, was quite evident at the high end of the sensitivity range (ISO 400). While the flash provided even illumination beyond its nominal distance range, thanks to an automatic ISO boost, the resulting photos were accompanied by excessive noise. In addition, the red-eye-reduction feature didn't seem to have much effect on reducing red eyes.

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