But, when it comes to pointing and shooting, both are idiot proof and have the important features all easily to hand.
Both sport bright 2.5in LCDs but Canon‘s 230,000 pixel display is superior to Nikon’s 153,000. Also note that only the Canon has an optical viewfinder.

Performance
It doesn’t take long to realise the Canon is better to use. The focus time is almost always fast while the Nikon too often struggled to decide what to focus on and too often got it wrong. When shooting objects very close up this was exacerbated.

In test conditions there’s very little between the two in terms of lens sharpness, detail and colour saturation. However, the Canon lens was a touch softer in the corners.

Outdoors, in high-contrast environments, the Canon more often made a better fist of focusing and exposure. However, it was more prone to chromatic aberrations (purple fringing) where light met dark.

In macro mode, the Canon’s more-accurate focusing is a boon and we found it easier to get closer and sharper pictures with it. In low light without flash the Nikon’s ISO 2000 rating trumps Canon’s max of ISO 1600: here the Nikon offered superior colour retention and definition but the noise rendered shots barely usable. The Canon’s at 800 were even noisier and unusable.

However, when the flash turned on it was the Canon which offered superior colour saturation while the Nikon’s shots looked relatively blown out (albeit very slightly).

Overall, the Nikon seemed to offer slightly better depth of field, but the Canon’s faster and sharper focusing meant that target was rendered sharper more often. However, picking which camera took which photograph in a blind test would be incredibly difficult.

Movie mode was more clear cut. Both offer DVD-quality 640 x 480 videos at 30fps. But the Canon’s image stabilisation is noticeably smoother than the Nikon’s which suffered from hand shake.

Battery life for both is similar but we recommend turning face recognition and the image stabilisation off most of the time to preserve the battery.

Conclusion
With similar price tags and picture quality balanced on a knife edge we looked elsewhere for a victor. As such, Canon’s superior features, design and handling born from tweaking several revisions of the same camera, tip the balance. It’s incredibly close – these are the best small compacts on the market - but we can’t see anyone being disappointed or frustrated with any aspect of the Canon (bar the time-lapse feature), and so it wins the day.

Total scores:

Canon: Overall: ****** (6 stars)
Nikon: