Bought a Canon Ixus 95 IS a couple of weeks ago, after browsing the web for hours and hours upon end to find decent reviews on various cameras, i came to the conclusion, don’t focus too much on quality, just take something that actually points and shoots and has enough options and settings for you to tinker with.

So, just after strolling into a photo equiment store i found this camera, the Canon Ixus 95 IS, and the price was slashed (cheaper than i could find anywhere online) because the store was quitting as people these days tend to buy more and more online giving retailers a hard time, bad for them, good for me.

After having played with it for a couple of weeks now, i must admint, i’m pretty amazed at the quality of these little things these days, sure, it doesn’t beat my 350D with Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM attached, but then again, that thing doesn’t fit in my pocket.

The camera starts up nice and fast, so it’s ideal for those ‘moments’ photos.

It has enough features and settings to tweak the camera enough so it is able to make more than decent pictures .

For example, i have to permanently keep the thing stopped down for atleast 2/3 EV so it won’t give you the trademark digital point-and-shoot look (you know, the burned out, white clipped and chromatic abberation garbage.)

My only 2 big gripes with this thing though are the fact that the camera needs a lot of light, otherwise the sensor noise becomes appearant very fast, and combine that with the overly aggresive noise reduction, it can quickly ruin an otherwise nice image.

Here’s some pictures taken with the camera, a macro shot, and two shots of my dog, one closup to show the fur detail (and a close crop to show the insane noise reduction at work) and a shot of my dog in full sunlight with some nice fill bounce from the grass and floor.

All images are resized to 800×600 using a BSpline resampling algorithm, the JPEGs are then saved out again using a float DCT method, a 1×1 subsampling factor on all channels, Optimized Huffman table, smoothing is off of course and JPEG quality is set to 90%.