This first shot was taken with the IXUS 980 IS / SD990 IS zoomed-out and set to its lowest 80 ISO sensitivity. With a widest equivalent of 36mm, you’ll need to stand back much further than models with 28mm coverage. Under these bright conditions it represents a best-case scenario, and the crops from well-corrected areas are certainly sharp and detailed, with only a faint smattering of noise in shadow areas, although the image becomes softer in the corners. Despite the high-contrast subject, there’s no fringing to mention.

Landscape: 6.46MB, Program, 1/250, f8, 100 ISO, 7.7-28.5mm at 7.7mm (36mm equivalent)

						Another shot taken under bright light with the lens zoomed-out and the sensitivity nudged up to 100 ISO. The slight increase in sensitivity hasn’t had much detrimental effect here, although the fine detail in the branches shows-up the softness in the corners of the image. Where the image is well-corrected though, there’s plenty of fine detail, and so far there’s no coloured fringing to complain about.

Landscape: 4.53MB, Program, 1/1600, f5.8, 200 ISO, 7.7-28.5mm at 28.5mm (133mm equivalent)

Optically the camera performs well when zoomed-in without the softening in the corners seen at ‘wide’ angle. The increase to 200 ISO has however resulted in greater noise levels and a softening of ultimate detail.

The camera has a manual mode, but selected its maximum aperture here in Program anyway, so what you’re seeing here is the minimum depth-of-field. Viewed at 100%, the background is a little blurred, but like other compacts it’s nothing like a DSLR.

A large portion of the image is in fairly sharp focus, allowing us to grab a variety of sharp crops, and again despite some high contrast areas, there’s no coloured fringing to complain about.

The boost to 400 ISO has further softened edges, but this subject matter is fairly forgiving.

Despite recognising the subject though, the camera has underexposed this part of the image.

This underexposure has also made the increase in noise levels more obvious than it could have been, but even then like most compacts, 400 ISO is step too far for large prints or 100% scrutiny.

As you’d expect, there’s another increase in noise levels, and as you’d expect, it’s visibly higher at this point than Canon’s lower resolution models.

But a sensible hands-off approach to NR means there’s still detail here, making 800 ISO ok for small prints.

Interestingly though, Canon has opted for less NR than previous models, avoiding smearing, with arguably preferable results. 1600 ISO is still best-reserved for email or very small prints though.

The Canon then goes onto offer a 3200 ISO option as a Scene Preset, albeit at a greatly reduced resolution of 2 Megapixels. You can see a sample of it and other sensitivities in our High ISO Noise results page.