I’ve just got home to find that Amazon has delivered my new toy – a Canon Digital Ixus 70. Whilst I still take the majority of my photos on my Nikon D70, carrying a body and a couple of lenses (as well as the paraphernalia that going anywhere with two small children involves) is sometimes a bit of a bind – it would be nice to have a good camera that I can slip in a pocket and take anywhere. Perhaps a mobile phone camera would fit the bill, but most of them have pretty poor lenses (necessarily so in a device that size) and when Vodafone
wanted over £300 for me to upgrade to the Nokia N95, I decided that I’d be better off buying a separate camera.

I’ve always liked Canon’s Ixus range of compact cameras – even when they used film – and the Digital Ixus 70 looks great to me. Basically it’s a 7.1MP camera with a nice large screen (and a viewfinder for when the sun makes using the screen impractical) for just over £120. I’ll probably struggle a bit at first with camera shake (as I’m used to holding a nice weighty body and lens) but I have a couple of overseas trips coming up and it will save me a lot of space in my suitcase.

One thing that’s good to see is that Windows Vista recognised and supported the camera without any intervention from me. Less helpful was the fact that Canon only includes a 32MB SD card in the box so I’ve ordered a 2GB Sandisk Extreme III which will provide fast (133x or 20MB/sec) read and write times. That’s coming from Play.com and is unlikely to be with me before I fly out to Prague on Sunday so, until that arrives, I picked up a cheap SD card from Tesco (1GB for just under a tenner) which can then be used as a spare.