As you’ll see throughout this gallery, the new DIGIC 4 processor delivers natural-looking results which are punchy without going over-the-top. The 28mm coverage also captured a wide view here.

The crops viewed at 100% are sharp and detailed with only slight sharpening artefacts.

We shot at a low angle, and while a flip-out screen would have been preferable, the monitor on the IXUS 870IS / SD 880IS remained visible thanks to a decent viewing angle.

In Auto sensitivity, the camera’s selected 100 ISO here, and pixel peepers may notice subtle textures in areas of flat colour – nothing to worry about yet though.

Looking closely at the 100% crops again reveals a little texture from noise in shadow areas or those with flat colour, and a small amount of fringing in the high contrast lifeboat supports towards the edge of the frame.

But again this is serious pixel-peeping and most would be very happy with the results here.

The camera easily locked-onto the subject’s face, but even with the largest aperture, the background remains almost as sharp as the foreground.

The crops also reveal an increase in noise due to the boost in sensitivity. This is sadly par for the course on most of today’s 10 Megapixel compacts, but is hardly noticeable on prints.

There’s some geometric distortion here with the lens zoomed-out, but the field is fairly flat with sharp results across most of it.

The increase to 400 ISO hasn’t been too detrimental in this example, but the subject matter is quite forgiving.

Face detection once again locked-on easily despite the subject’s face turning to profile.

Detailed areas of the image, such as the magazine covers look good, but where there’s flat areas of colour or shadow regions, the noise textures are quite apparent.

The result still looks acceptable for most prints though.

The increased sensitivity has unsurprisingly brought a noticeable reduction in quality here with quite visible noise and in this particular image, a slight loss of saturation.

The crops do still contain a reasonable degree of detail though, but like most compacts, 800 ISO is best reserved for smaller prints.

Here’s there’s a significant reduction in quality with undesirable artefacts through noise and noise reduction.

So again, like most compacts, 1600 ISO should be avoided unless for emergency use or small emailed images.

The Canon also offers a 3200 ISO mode, but as a scene preset operating at just 2 Megapixels. You can see an example of it in our High ISO Noise results.