The Ixus 65 has been our A-List champion for months, so we thought we’d look at its close sibling, the Ixus 60. The deciding factor for purchasers is that the 65 has a stunning 3-inch LCD instead of the 60’s viewfinder and 2.5-inch LCD. It’s got its work cut out for it against the cheaper rivals on test here. At $477, the Ixus’s 2816 x 2112 resolution, 3x optical zoom and stunning 2.5in display are nothing out of the ordinary. At least with the latter it’s still relatively easy to detect camera shake and check focus.

While there are no aperture- or shutter-priority modes, there are 11 scene presets, which optimise settings for common situations. The colour accent and swap modes are retained, if buried away. Sharpness, contrast and saturation settings are also hidden too deeply for our liking, and there’s no live histogram or continuous focusing mode.

However, there’s plenty to like. It’s superbly built (excusing the slightly flimsy plastic battery/SD card door) and is small enough to carry everywhere – although there are lighter and slimmer choices. There are plenty of nice touches like the orientation sensor, which rotates images when you turn the camera in your hands, and the brilliant continuous mode, which can shoot at full quality at 2.1fps.

The Ixus 60’s 3x Canon zoom lens might be tiny, but it’s still great quality. Images were super sharp, only becoming slightly soft in the corners, and that’s only when looking closely, at 100 percent.

Outdoors, the Canon proved king of the sub-$500 compacts, producing near-perfect exposures every time with great resolution and no noise or chromatic aberrations, except in extreme contrast scenes. Accurate colours and perfect saturation make up for any fringing.

Indoors, the auto white balance couldn’t keep up with the Nikon’s and more noise was evident than we’d expected. However, images were sharp and had excellent detail. With the flash switched on, images had better white balance and noise completely disappeared. Noise wasn’t a problem in our night shot either, which did show excellent white balance.

And, for macro shots, few cameras can match the Canon for closeness. Movies were great too – VGA clips can be shot at 30fps and, unlike others, the Ixus supports digital zooming. Average audio quality was our only gripe.

Overall, the shortcomings are far outweighed by the benefits and, even at this price, the Ixus 60 offers superb value and quality in a pocketable format.