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Perhaps I was just unlucky...
I bought this camera in March 08. Initial view was it was a good camera for the price as it did all I needed it to do. However, from the off a message came up saying there was an error with the lens. This could be resolved by turning the camera on and off. Unfortunately, this solution failed when we were on holiday in August and the lens would not retract. Contacted Amazon who gave me Canon's number, who in turn gave me an address to send the camera to for repair. The optical unit was replaced free of charge and returned within a week at no cost as still under warranty. I would have awarded more stars if this problem hadn't happened.

Immensely likeable
I owned one of these for a few months. I bought it here and then sold it on eBay for almost the same money, because it has a certain cult value. I miss it. On a photographic level it is nothing special, but it is an excellent "user camera". The lens is nice and sharp, but there are very few photographic controls; it doesn't even have a proper aperture, instead it applies a neutral density filter (with a little "click") when the scene is too bright for the top shutter speed to handle. High-ISO performance is unimpressive, and the zoom doesn't zoom very far at all. It goes from moderately wideangle to head-and-shoulders portrait. Exposures beyond a certain length have to be enabled with a special "night shoot" mode whereby you can select exposure times of up to 15 seconds; but you have to set this manually by guesswork, and you can only use one-second increments. The flash is unimpressive and takes a while to recharge. There was a noticeable shutter lag. No RAW. It has the inherently limited dynamic range and relatively high noise of all compact cameras.

BUT, on the other hand, I still enjoyed the camera because it gets everything else right. At low ISOs the noise reduction is unobtrusive. The screen is large and clear, the metal body feels tough - except for the battery/memory card flap, which was downright shoddy - and it is small enough to stick into a shirt pocket. It is a life companion-type camera, the kind of camera that you have no reason not to carry with you. I weep to think of all the things I could have photographed, but did not, because I could not be bothered to carry a bulky SLR with me all the time; not because I was lazy, but because it was a bind to carry an SLR in a bag, and take it out of the bag, and put it back into the bag, and keep the bag from bashing against things etc. With the Ixus 70 I could stick it into a jacket pocket and forget about it. I took hundreds of photographs that I would otherwise not have taken. I *used* the Ixus 70. "The dead know one thing - it is better to be alive."

Also, it has a timelapse movie mode. I loved that. I had great fun gaffer-taping the camera to my bicycle, and making timelapse movies of bicycle rides. I loved resting the camera against something in the garden, and making timelapse movies of clouds going by. The body is flat, which means that it is easy to rest on and tape to things. If only more cameras were flat, instead of being gently curved. I could take long-duration exposures without a tripod in portrait mode by resting the camera on its side.

The big screen is worth a mention. As a means of taking notes, and quickly showing people the results, the camera is superb. It is easy to pocket, it flicks from image to image quickly, and you can rest it flat on a table. The Ixus 70 is excellent as a digital image memo-taking machine.

Overall therefore the Ixus 70 is a modest, keenly-priced digital camera with functionality that pales beside Canon's keenly-priced Powershot AXXX range. It doesn't have image stabilisation. In the future no-one will care about it or write about it. Back in the 1970s there was a camera called the Minox 35, a tiny 35mm camera that became famous in part because Andy Warhol used to carry one about. He carried it about because it suited him, not because he was copying someone; other people copied him. I think of the Ixus 70 in the same way. It is an extremely practical user camera that only really falls down in low light, either at night or in party-type situations, but then again almost all compact cameras fall down in low light, except the old Fuji F30, and that costs more than the Ixus 70!

Great Results
I bought this camera in May 08 and I am indeed quite pleased with it. Earlier I owned a Nikon Coolpix for 3 years, but it stopped working due to our fault, so we needed a new one. After reading a lot about this one, on Amazon, plus with a good price value we decided to buy it.

I would also recommend to buy a 2GB or more SD card with this, as then you can store loads of videos and pictures. We took this camera to our holiday recently and had to charge only 3 times in a week, despite we took 6 videos and over 300 pictures. The picture quality is very good. The best feature I like about this camera is that you can tilt the camera vertically to view vertical shots and horizontally to see the horizontal shots!!

I also bought the same camera for my cousin as it is so good...

not all good news
the card and battery cover is worthy of a 10p toy very poor - worse still mine was deliverd with a fault - strong horz lines across the pictures and total over exposure in daylight. Let see how Canon respond this, one is scrap.

(Almost) Faultless
Bought this camera a year ago. The only niggle that I have is the lack of a battery meter. It is the best 'point and shoot' digital camera that I have used/owned. It is small and easy to use.